Scepticism and animal faith : introduction to a system of philosophy

SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

BOOKS BT THE S4ME AUTHOR.

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND LATER
SOLILOQUIES.

CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE

UNITED STATES. With Reminiscences

of William James and Josiah Royce and

Academic Life in America.

LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE

WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA.

Edited by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.

INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND
RELIGION.

THE LIFE OF REASON. Five Volumes.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY.

POEMS.

SCEPTICISM
AND ANIMAL FAITH

INTRODUCTION TO
A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1923

First published 1933

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

PREFACE

HERE is one more system of philosophy. If the reader
is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with
him, and that my system — to which this volume is
a critical introduction — differs widely in spirit and
pretensions from what usually goes by that name.
In the first place, my system is not mine, nor new. I
am merely attempting to express for the reader the
principles to which he appeals when he smiles. There
are convictions in the depths of his soul, beneath all
his overt parrot beliefs, on which I would build our
friendship. I have a great respect for orthodoxy ;
not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular
schools or nations, and which vary from age to age,
but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the senti
ment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere. I
think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is
technically sounder than the special schools of philo
sophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the
facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find
in some detail the key to the whole. I am animated
by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with
the old prejudices and workaday opinions of man
kind : they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded.
What novelty my version of things may possess is
meant simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by
giving to everyday beliefs a more accurate and circum
spect form. I do not pretend to place myself at the

vi SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its
periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as
animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from
one quarter and then from another, expecting the
reality to be not simpler than my experience of it,
but far more extensive and complex. I stand in
philosophy exactly where I stand, in daily life ; I
should not be honest otherwise. ^-J accept the same
miscellaneous witnesses, bow to the same obvious
facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit
the same encircling ignorance^)

My system, accordingly, is no system of the universe.
The Realms of Being of which I speak are not parts
of a cosmos, nor one great cosmos together : they are
only kinds or categories of things which I find con
spicuously different and worth distinguishing, at least
in my own thoughts. I do not know how many
things in the universe at large may fall under each of
these classes, nor what other Realms of Being may
not exist, to which I have no approach or which I
have not happened to distinguish in my personal
observation of the world. Logic, like language, is
partly a free construction and partly a means of
symbolising and harnessing in expression the existing
diversities of things ; and whilst some languages,
given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more
beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a
foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native
language is intelligible or right. No language or logic
is right in the sense of being identical with the facts
it is used to express, but each may be right by being
faithful to these facts, as a translation may be faithful.
My endeavour is to think straight in such terms as
are offered to me, to clear my mind of cant and free
it from the cramp of artificial traditions ; but I do
not ask any one to think in my terms if he prefers
others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows

PREFACE vii

of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect
may spread more brightly before him.

Moreover, my system, save in the mocking literary
sense of the word, is not metaphysical. It contains
much criticism of metaphysics, and some refinements
in speculation, like the doctrine of essence, which are
not familiar to the public ; and I do not disclaim
being metaphysical because I at all dislike dialectic
or disdain immaterial things : indeed, it is of im
material things, essence, truth, and spirit that I speak
chiefly. But logic and mathematics and literary
psychology (when frankly literary) are not meta
physical, although their subject-matter is immaterial,
and their application to existing things is often
questionable. Metaphysics, in the proper sense of
the word, is dialectical physics, or an attempt to
determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral
or rhetorical constructions. It arises by a confusion
of those Realms of Being which it is my special care
to distinguish. It is neither physical speculation nor
pure logic nor honest literature, but (as in the treatise
of Aristotle first called by that name) a hybrid of the
three, materialising ideal entities, turning harmonies
into forces, and dissolving natural things into terms
of discourse. Speculations about the natural world,
such as those of the Ionian philosophers, are not
metaphysics, but simply cosmology or natural philo
sophy. Now in natural philosophy I am a decided
materialist — apparently the only one living ; and I am
well aware that idealists are fond of calling materialism,
too, metaphysics, in rather an angry tone, so as to
cast discredit upon it by assimilating it to their own
systems. But my materialism, for all that, is not
metaphysical. I do not profess to know what matter
is in itself, and feel no confidence in the divination of
those esprits forts who, leading a life of vice, thought
the universe must be composed of nothing but dice

viii SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

and billiard-balls. I wait for the men of science to
tell me what matter is, in so far as they can discover
it, and am not at all surprised or troubled at the
abstractness and vagueness of their ultimate concep
tions : how should our notions of things so remote
from the scale and scope of our senses be anything
but schematic ? But whatever matter may be, I call
it matter boldly, as I call my acquaintances Smith
and Jones without knowing their secrets : whatever it
may be, it must present the aspects and undergo the
motions of the gross objects that fill the world : and
if belief in the existence of hidden parts and movements
in nature be metaphysics, then the kitchen-maid is a
metaphysician whenever she peels a potato.

My system, finally, though, of course, formed under
the fire of contemporary discussions, is no phase of
any current movement. I cannot take at all seriously
the present flutter of the image-lovers against in
telligence. I love images as much as they do, but
images must be discounted in our waking life, when
we come to business. I also appreciate the other
reforms and rebellions that have made up the history
of philosophy. I prize their sharp criticism of one
another and their several discoveries ; the trouble is
that each in turn has denied or forgotten a much
more important truth than it has asserted. The first
philosophers, the original observers of life and nature,
were the best ; and I think only the Indians and the
Greek naturalists, together with Spinoza, have been
right on the chief issue, the relation of man and of his
spirit to the universe. It is not unwillingness to be
a disciple that prompts me to look beyond the modern
scramble of philosophies : I should gladly learn of
them all, if they had learned more of one another.
Even as it is, I endeavour to retain the positive insight
of each, reducing it to the scale of nature and keeping
it in its place ; thus I am a Platonist in logic and

PREFACE ix

morals, and a transcendentalist in romantic soliloquy,
when I choose to indulge in it. Nor is it necessary,
in being teachable by any master, to become eclectic.
All these vistas give glimpses of the same wood, and
a fair and true map of it must be drawn to a single
scale, by one method of projection, and in one style
of calligraphy. All known truth can be rendered in
any language, although the accent and poetry of
each may be incommunicable ; and as I am content
to write in English, although it was not my mother-
tongue, and although in speculative matters I have
not much sympathy with the English mind, so I am
content to follow the European tradition in philosophy,
little as I respect its rhetorical metaphysics, its human
ism, and its worldliness.

There is one point, indeed, in which I am truly
sorry not to be able to profit by the guidance of my
contemporaries. There is now a great ferment in
natural and mathematical philosophy and the times
seem ripe for a new system of nature, at once ingenuous
and comprehensive, such as has not appeared since
the earlier days of Greece. We may soon be all
believing in an honest cosmology, comparable with
that of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, or Democritus. I
wish such scientific systems joy, and if I were com
petent to follow or to forecast their procedure, I
should gladly avail myself of their results, which are
bound to be no less picturesque than instructive.
But what exists to-day is so tentative, obscure, and
confused by bad philosophy, that there is no knowing
what parts may be sound and what parts merely
personal and scatter-brained. If I were a mathe
matician I should no doubt regale myself, if not the
reader, with an electric or logistic system of the
universe expressed in algebraic symbols. For good
or ill, I am an ignorant man, almost a poet, and
I can only spread a feast of what everybody knows.

x SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Fortunately exact science and the books of the learned
are not necessary to establish my essential doctrine,
nor can any of them claim a higher warrant than it
has in itself : for it rests on public experience. It
needs, to prove it, only the stars, the seasons, the
swarm of animals, the spectacle of birth and death,
of cities and wars. My philosophy is justified, and
has been justified in all ages and countries, by the
facts before every man's eyes ; and no great wit is
requisite to discover it, only (what is rarer than wit)
candour and courage. Learning does not liberate
men from superstition when their souls are cowed or
perplexed ; and, without learning, clear eyes and
honest reflection can discern the hang of the world,
and distinguish the edge of truth from the might of
imagination. In the past or in the future, my language
and my borrowed knowledge would have been different,
but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is
the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE ...... v

CHAP. -

I. THERE is NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM . . I ~X/

II. DOGMA AND DOUBT . . . . .6

III. WAYWARD SCEPTICISM . . . . .11

IV. DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . . .21
V. DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE . . . .27

VI. ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM . . . . -33

VII. NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS .... 42 "

VIII. SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION . . 49

IX. THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE . . . .67

X. SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY . . -77

XI. THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM . . .99

XII. IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES . 109

XIII. BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION . . . .116

XIV. ESSENCE AND INTUITION . . . .125
XV. BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE . . . .134

XVI. BELIEF IN THE SELF . . . . .14.5

XVII. THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY . . .150

XVIII. KNOWLEDGE is FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS . .164

XIX. BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE . . . . .182

XX. ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE . 192

xi

xii SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

CHAP. PAGE

XXI. SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH . . .214

XXII. BELIEF IN NATURE ..... 233

XXIII. EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE . . . 240

XXIV. LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY . . . .252
XXV. THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH . . . 262

XXVI. DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT .... 272

XXVII. COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE . 289

INDEX . . . . .311

CHAPTER I

THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM

A PHILOSOPHER is compelled to follow the maxim of
epic poets and to plunge in medias res. The origin
of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed
to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled very
far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must
precede my first dawn. The light as it appears hides
the candle. Perhaps there is no source of things at
all, no simpler form from which they are evolved, but
only an endless succession of different complexities.
In that case nothing would be lost by joining the
procession wherever one happens to come upon it,
and following it as long as one's legs hold out. Every
one might still observe a typical bit of it ; he would
not have understood anything better if he had seen
more things ; he would only have had more to explain.
The very notion of understanding or explaining any
thing would then be absurd ; yet this notion is drawn
from a current presumption or experience to the effect
that in some directions at least things do grow out of
simpler things : bread can be baked, and dough and
fire and an oven are conjoined in baking it. Such an
episode is enough to establish the notion of origins and
explanations, without at all implying that the dough
and the hot oven are themselves primary facts. A
philosopher may accordingly perfectly well undertake
to find episodes of evolution in the world : parents

i B

2 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

with children, storms with shipwrecks, passions with
tragedies. If he begins in the middle he will still begin
at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much
at the beginning of things as he could possibly begin.

On the other hand, this whole supposition may be
wrong. Things may have had some simpler origin,
or may contain simpler elements. In that case it will
be incumbent on the philosopher to prove this fact ;
that is, to find in the complex present objects
evidence of their composition out of simples. But
in this proof also he would be beginning in the middle ;
and he would reach origins or elements only at the
end of his analysis.

The case is similar with respect to first principles
of discourse. They can never be discovered, if
discovered at all, until they have been long taken for
granted, and employed in the very investigation which
reveals them. The more cogent a logic is, the fewer
and simpler its first principles will turn out to have
been ; but in discovering them, and deducing the rest
from them, they must first be employed unawares, if
they are the principles lending cogency to actual dis
course ; so that the mind must trust current pre
sumptions no less in discovering that they are logical
—that is, justified by more general unquestioned pre
sumptions — than in discovering that they are arbitrary
and merely instinctive.

It is true that, quite apart from living discourse, a
set of axioms and postulates, as simple as we like, may
be posited in the air, and deductions drawn from them
ad libitum ; but such pure logic is otiose, unless we
find or assume that discourse or nature actually follows
it ; and it is not by deduction from first principles,
arbitrarily chosen, that human reasoning actually
proceeds, but by loose habits of mental evocation
which such principles at best may exhibit afterwards
in an idealised form. Moreover, if we could strip our

NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM 3

thought for the arena of a perfect logic, we should
be performing, perhaps, a remarkable dialectical feat ;
but this feat would be a mere addition to the com
plexities of nature, and no simplification. This motley
world, besides its other antics, would then contain
logicians and their sports. If by chance, on turning
to the flowing facts, we found by analysis that they
obeyed that ideal logic, we should again be beginning
with things as we find them in the gross, and not with
first principles.

It may be observed in passing that no logic to
which empire over nature or over human discourse
has ever been ascribed has been a cogent logic ; it has
been, in proportion to its exemplification in existence,
a mere description, psychological or historical, of an
actual procedure ; whereas pure logic, when at last,
quite recently, it was clearly conceived, turned out
instantly to have no necessary application to anything,
and to be merely a parabolic excursion into the realm
of essence.

In the tangle of human beliefs, as conventionally
expressed in talk and in literature, it is easy to dis
tinguish a compulsory factor called facts or things
from a more optional and argumentative factor called
suggestion or interpretation ; not that what we call
facts are at all indubitable, or composed of immediate
data, but that in the direction of fact we come much
sooner to a stand, and feel that we are safe from
criticism. To reduce conventional beliefs to the facts
they rest on — however questionable those facts
themselves may be in other ways — is to clear our intel
lectual conscience of voluntary or avoidable delusion.
If what we call a fact still deceives us, we feel we are
not to blame ; we should not call it a fact.did we see
any way of eluding the recognition of it. C"To reduce
conventional belief to the recognition of matters of
fact is empirical criticism of knowledge, i

4 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

The more drastic this criticism is, and the more
revolutionary the view to which it reduces me, the
clearer will be the contrast between what I find I
know and what I thought I knew. But if these plain
facts were all I had to go on, how did I reach those
strange conclusions ? What principles of interpreta
tion, what tendencies to feign, what habits of inference
were at work in me ? For if nothing in the facts
justified my beliefs, something in me must have
suggested them. To disentangle and formulate these
subjective principles of interpretation is transcend
ental criticism of knowledge.

Transcendental criticism in the hands of Kant
and his followers was a sceptical instrument used
by persons who were not sceptics. They accordingly
imported into their argument many uncritical assump
tions, such as that these tendencies to feign must be
the same in everybody, that the notions of nature,
history, or mind which they led people to adopt were
the right or standard notions on these subjects, and
that it was glorious, rather than ignominious or
sophistical, to build on these principles an encyclo
paedia of false sciences and to call it knowledge. A
true sceptic will begin by throwing over all those
academic conventions as so much confessed fiction ;
and he will ask rather if, when all that these arbitrary
tendencies to feign import into experience has been
removed, any factual element remains at all. The
only critical function of transcendentalism is to drive
empiricism home, and challenge it to produce any
knowledge of fact whatsoever. And empirical criti
cism will not be able to do so. Just as inattention
leads ordinary people to assume as part of the given
facts all that their unconscious transcendental logic
has added to them, so inattention, at a deeper level,
leads the empiricist to assume an existence in his
radical facts which does not belong to them. In

NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM 5

standing helpless and resigned before them he is, for
all his assurance, obeying his illusion rather than their
evidence. Thus transcendental criticism, used by a
thorough sceptic, may compel empirical criticism to
show its hand. It had mistaken its cards, and was
bluffing without knowing it.

CHAPTER II

DOGMA AND DOUBT

CUSTOM does not breed understanding, but takes its
place, teaching people to make their way contentedly
through the world without knowing what the world is,
nor what they think of it, nor what they are. When
their attention is attracted to some remarkable thing,
say to the rainbow, this thing is not analysed nor
examined from various points of view, but all the
casual resources of the fancy are called forth in con
ceiving it, and this total reaction of the mind pre
cipitates a dogma ; the rainbow is taken for an omen
of fair weather, or for a trace left in the sky by the
passage of some beautiful and elusive goddess. Such
a dogma, far from being an interpenetration or
identification of thought with the truth of the object,
is a fresh and additional object in itself. The original
passive perception remains unchanged ; the thing
remains unfathomed ; and as its diffuse influence has
by chance bred one dogma to-day, it may breed a
different dogma to-morrow. We have therefore, as
we progress in our acquaintance with the world, an
always greater confusion. Besides the original fantastic
inadequacy of our perceptions, we have now rival
clarifications of them, and a new uncertainty as to
whether these dogmas are relevant to the original
object, or are themselves really clear, or if so, which
of them is true.

DOGMA AND DOUBT 7

A prosperous dogmatism is indeed not impossible.
We may have such determinate minds that the
suggestions of experience always issue there in the
same dogmas ; and these orthodox dogmas, perpetually
revived by the stimulus of things, may become our
dominant or even our sole apprehension of them.
We shall really have moved to another level of mental
discourse ; we shall be living on ideas. In the
gardens of Seville I once heard, coming through the
tangle of palms and orange trees, the treble voice
of a pupil in the theological seminary, crying to his
playmate : * You booby ! of course angels have a
more perfect nature than men." With his black and
red cassock that child had put on dialectic ; he was
playing the game of dogma and dreaming in words,
and was insensible to the scent of violets that filled
the air. How long would that last ? Hardly, I
suspect, until the next spring ; and the troubled
awakening which puberty would presently bring to
that little dogmatist, sooner or later overtakes all
elder dogmatists in the press of the world. The
more perfect the dogmatism, the more insecure. A
great high topsail that can never be reefed nor furled
is the first carried away by the gale.

To me the opinions of mankind, taken without any
contrary prejudice (since I have no rival opinions to
propose) but simply contrasted with the course of
nature, seem surprising fictions ; and the marvel is
how they can be maintained. What strange religions,
what ferocious moralities, what slavish fashions, what
sham interests ! I can explain it all only by saying
to myself that intelligence is naturally forthright ; it
forges ahead ; it piles fiction on fiction ; and the fact
that the dogmatic structure, for the time being, stands
and grows, passes for a proof of its rightness. Right
indeed it is in one sense, as vegetation is right ; it is
vital ; it has plasticity and warmth, and a certain

8 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

indirect correspondence with its soil and climate.
Many obviously fabulous dogmas, like those of religion,
might for ever dominate the most active minds, except
for one circumstance. In the jungle one tree strangles
another, and luxuriance itself is murderous. So is
luxuriance in the human mind. What kills spon
taneous fictions, what recalls the impassioned fancy
from its improvisation, is the angry voice of some
contrary fancy. Nature, silently making fools of us
all our lives, never would bring us to our senses ; but
the maddest assertions of the mind may do so, when
they challenge one another. Criticism arises out of
the conflict of dogmas.

May I escape this predicament and criticise without
a dogmatic criterion ? Hardly ; for though the criti
cism may be expressed hypothetically, as for instance
in saying that if any child knew his own father he
would be a wise child, yet the point on which doubt
is thrown is a point of fact, and that there are fathers
and children is assumed dogmatically. If not, how
ever obscure the essential relation between fathers
and children might be ideally, no one could be wise
or foolish in assigning it in any particular instance,
since no such terms would exist in nature at all.
Scepticism is a suspicion of error about facts, and to
suspect error about facts is to share the enterprise
of knowledge, in which facts are presupposed and
error is possible. The sceptic thinks himself shrewd,
and often is so ; his intellect, like the intellect he
criticises, may have some inkling of the true hang
and connection of things ; he may have pierced to a
truth of nature behind current illusions. Since his
criticism may thus be true and his doubt well grounded,
they are certainly assertions ; and if he is sincerely
a sceptic, they are assertions which he is ready to
maintain stoutly. Scepticism is accordingly a form
of belief. Dogma cannot be abandoned ; it can only

DOGMA AND DOUBT 9

be revised in view of some more elementary dogma
which it has not yet occurred to the sceptic to doubt ;
and he may be right in every point of his criticism,
except in fancying that his criticism is radical and
that he is altogether a sceptic.

This vital compulsion to posit and to believe
something, even in the act of doubting, would never
theless be ignominious, if the beliefs which life and
intelligence forced upon me were always false. I
should then be obliged to honour the sceptic for his
heroic though hopeless effort to eschew belief, and I
should despise the dogmatist for his willing subservi
ence to illusion. The sequel will show, I trust, that
this is not the case ; that intelligence fc by nature
v£ridical, and that its ambition to reach the truth is
sane and capable of satisfaction, even if each of its
efforts actually fails. To convince me of this fact,
however, I must first justify my faith in many sub
sidiary beliefs concerning animal economy and the
human mind and the world they flourish in.

That scepticism should intervene in philosophy at
all is an accident of human history, due to much
unhappy experience of perplexity and error. If all
had gone well, assertions would be made spontaneously
in dogmatic innocence, and the very notion of a right
to make them would seem as gratuitous as in fact it
is ; because all the realms of being lie open to a spirit
plastic enough to conceive them, and those that have
ears to hear, may hear. Nevertheless, in the con
fused state of human speculation this embarrassment
obtrudes itself automatically, and a philosopher to-day
would be ridiculous and negligible who had not
strained his dogmas through the utmost rigours of
scepticism, and who did not approach every opinion,
whatever his own ultimate faith, with the courtesy
and smile of the sceptic. ^

The brute necessity of believing something so long

io SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular j*
nor does it assure me that not to live would not, for
this very reason, be far safer and saner. To be dead
and have no opinions would certainly not be to discover
the truth ; but if all opinions are necessarily false, it
would at least be not to sin against intellectual honour.
Let me then push scepticism as far as I logically can,
and endeavour to clear my mind of illusion, even at
the price of intellectual suicide.

CHAPTER III

WAYWARD SCEPTICISM

CRITICISM surprises the soul in the arms of convention.
Children insensibly accept all the suggestions of sense
and language, the only initiative they show being a
certain wilfulness in the extension of these notions,
a certain impulse towards private superstition. This
is soon corrected by education or broken off rudely,
like the nails of a tender hand, by hard contact with
custom, fact, or derision. Belief then settles down in
sullenness and apathy to a narrow circle of vague
assumptions, to none of which the mind need have
any deep affinity, none of which it need really
understand, but which nevertheless it clings to for
lack of other footing. The philosophy of the common
man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he
cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions
that strangers may cast on her character.

Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is
religious belief ; really the least vital and most
arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring, as
it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that
very reason the most jealously defended ; since it is
on being attacked there, at the least defensible point,
that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first
aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally
sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intel
lectual habits can be reasonably preserved ; they are

12 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all.
Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition,
regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain,
as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality
and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly
precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in.
the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite
a different form ; and partly because, when genuine,
it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like
poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of
the world soon learns to discredit established religions
on account of their variety and absurdity, although
he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his
own ; and a mystic before long begins fervently to
condemn current dogmas, on account of his own
different inspiration. LJWithout philosophical criticism,
therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest
that all positive religions are false, or at least (which
is enough for my present purpose) that they are all
fantastic and insecure^

Closely allied with religious beliefs there are usually
legends and histories, dramatic if not miraculous ;
and a man who knows anything of literature and has
observed how histories are written, even in the most
enlightened times, needs no satirist to remind him
that all histories, in so far as they contain a system,
a drama, or a moral, are so much literary fiction,
and probably disingenuous. Common sense, however,
will still admit that there are recorded facts not to be
doubted, as it will admit that there are obvious physical
facts ; and it is here, when popular philosophy has
been reduced to a kind of positivism, that the specula
tive critic may well step upon the scene.

Criticism, I have said, has no first principle, and
its desultory character may be clearly exhibited at
this point by asking whether the evidence of science
or that of history should be questioned first. I might

WAYWARD SCEPTICISM 13

impugn the belief in physical facts reported by the
senses and by natural science, such as the existence
of a ring of Saturn, reducing them to appearances,
which are facts reported by personal remembrance ;
this is actually _the choice^made by British_and
critics of Knowledge, whoy-relying orTmemory
have denied the eidatgnce'

.but experienced Yet the opposite procedure would"
seenTlnTJrtrjrrdicious ; knowledge of the facts reported
by history is mediated by documents which are
physical facts ; and these documents must first be
discovered and believed to have subsisted unknown
and to have had a more or less remote origin in time
and place, before they can be taken as evidence for
any mental events ; for if I did not believe that there
had been any men in Athens I should not imagine
they had had any thoughts. Even personal memory,
when it professes to record any distant experience, can
recognise and place this experience only by first
reconstructing the material scene in which it occurred.
Memory records moral events in terms of their physical
occasions ; and if the latter are merely imaginary, the
former must be doubly so, like the thoughts of a per
sonage in a novel. My remembrance of the past is a
novel I am constantly recomposing ; and it would not
be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material
events which mark and ballast my career had not their
public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
Romantic solipsism, in which the self making up
the universe is a moral person endowed with memory
and vanity, is accordingly untenable. Not that it is
unthinkable or self - contradictory ; because all the
complementary objects which might be requisite to
give point and body to the idea of oneself might be
only ideas and not facts ; and a solitary deity imagin
ing a world or remembering his own past constitutes
a perfectly conceivable universe. But this imagination

i4 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

would have no truth and this remembrance no control ;
so that the fond belief of such a deity that he knew
his own past would be the most groundless of dogmas ;
and while by chance the dogma might be true, that
deity would have no reason to think it so. At the
first touch of criticism he would be obliged to confess
that his alleged past was merely a picture now before
him, and that he had no reason to suppose that this
picture had had any constancy in successive moments,
or that he had lived through previous moments at all ;
nor could any new experience ever lend any colour or
corroboration to such a pathological conviction. This is
obvious ; so that romantic solipsism, although perhaps
an interesting state of mind, is not a position capable of
defence ; and any solipsism which is not a solipsism
of the present moment is logically contemptible.

The postulates on which empirical knowledge and
inductive science are based — namely, thafL tl^ere has
been a past, that it was sucR alTltis now thought
" iat there wilL be a future and that it must,

for some inconceivable reason, resemble the past and
obey the same laws — these are all gratuitous dogmas.
The sceptic in his honest retreat knows nothing of
a future, and has no need of such an unwarrantable
idea. He may perhaps have images before him of
scenes somehow not in the foreground, with a sense
of before and after running through the texture of
them ; and he may call this background of his sentiency
the past ; but the relative obscurity and evanescence
of these phantoms will not prompt him to suppose
that they have retreated to obscurity from the light
of day. They will be to him simply what he experi
ences them as being, denizens of the twilight. It
would be a vain fancy to imagine that these ghosts
had once been men ; they are simply nether gods,
native to the Erebus they inhabit. The world present
to the sceptic may continue to fade into these opposite

WAYWARD SCEPTICISM 15

abysses, the past and the future ; but having renounced
all prejudice and checked all customary faith, he will
regard both as painted abysses only, like the opposite
exits to the country and to the city on the ancient
stage. He will see the masked actors (and he will
invent a reason) rushing frantically out on one side
and in at the other ; but he knows that the moment
they are out of sight the play is over for them ; those
outlying regions and those reported events which the
messengers narrate so impressively are pure fancy ;
and there is nothing for him but to sit in his seat and
lend his mind to the tragic illusion.

The solipsist thus becomes an incredulous spectator
of his own romance, thinks his own adventures fictions,
and accepts a solipsism of the present moment. This
is an honest position, and certain attempts to refute it
as self-contradictory are based on a misunderstanding.
For example, it is irrelevant to urge that the present
moment cannot comprise the whole of existence
because the phrase " a present moment " implies a
chain of moments ; or that the mind that calls any
moment the present moment virtually transcends it
and posits a past and a future beyond it. These
arguments confuse the convictions of the solipsist
with those of a spectator describing him from outside.
The sceptic is not committed to the implications of
other men's language ; nor can he be convicted out
of his own mouth by the names he is obliged to bestow
on the details of his momentary vision. There may
be long vistas in it ; there may be many figures of
men and beasts, many legends and apocalypses depicted
on his canvas ; there may even be a shadowy frame
about it, or the suggestion of a gigantic ghostly some
thing on the hither side of it which he may call him
self. All this wealth of objects is not inconsistent with
solipsism, although the implication of the conventional
terms in which those objects are described may render

16 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

it difficult for the solipsist always to remember his
solitude. Yet when he reflects, he perceives it ; and
all his heroic efforts are concentrated on not asserting

O

and not implying anything, but simply noticing what
he finds. Scepticism is not concerned to abolish
ideas ; it can relish the variety and order of a pictured
world, or of any number of them in succession,
without any of the qualms and exclusions proper to
dogmatism. Its case is simply not to credit these
ideas, not to posit any of these fancied worlds, nor
this ghostly mind imagined as viewing them. The
attitude of the sceptic is not inconsistent ; it is merely
difficult, because it is hard for the greedy intellect
to keep its cake without eating it. Very voracious
dogmatists like Spinoza even assert that it is impossible,
but the impossibility is only psychological, and due to
their voracity ; they no doubt speak truly for them
selves when they say that the idea of a horse, if not
contradicted by some other idea, is a belief that the
horse exists ; but this would not be the case if they
felt no impulse to ride that imagined horse, or to get
out of its way. Ideas become beliefs only when by
precipitating tendencies to action they persuade me
that they are signs of things ; and these things are
not those ideas simply hypostatised, but are believed
to be compacted of many parts, and full of ambushed
powers, entirely absent from the ideas. The belief
is imposed on me surreptitiously by a latent mechanical
reaction of my body on the object producing the idea ;
it is by no means implied in any qualities obvious in
that idea. Such a latent reaction, being mechanical,
can hardly be avoided, but it may be discounted in
reflection, if a man has experience and the poise of a
philosopher ; and scepticism is not the less honourable
for being difficult, when it is inspired by a firm
determination to probe this confused and terrible
apparition of life to the bottom.

WAYWARD SCEPTICISM 17

So far is solipsism of the present moment from
being self-contradictory that it might, under other
circumstances, be the normal and invincible attitude
of the spirit ; and I suspect it may be that of many
animals. The difficulties I find in maintaining it
consistently come from the social and laborious
character of human life. A creature whose whole
existence was passed under a hard shell, or was spent
in a free flight, might find nothing paradoxical or
acrobatic in solipsism ; nor would he feel the anguish
which men feel in doubt, because doubt leaves them
defenceless and undecided in the presence of on
coming events. A creature whose actions were pre
determined might have a clearer mind. He might
keenly enjoy the momentary scene, never conceiving
himself as a separate body or as anything but the
unity of that scene, nor his enjoyment as anything but
its beauty : nor would he harbour the least suspicion
that it would change or perish, nor any objection to
its doing so if it chose. Solipsism would then be
selflessness and scepticism simplicity. They would
not be open to disruption from within. The ephemeral
insect would accept the evidence of his ephemeral
object, whatever quality this might chance to have ;
he would not suppose, as Descartes did, that in think
ing anything his own existence was involved. Being
new-born himself, with only this one innate (and also
experimental) idea, he would bring to his single
experience no extraneous habits of interpretation or
inference ; and he would not be troubled by doubts,
because he would believe nothing.

For men, however, who are long-lived and teachable
animals, solipsism of the present moment is a violent
pose, permitted only to the young philosopher, in his
first intellectual despair ; and even he often cheats
himself when he thinks he assumes it, and professing
to stand on his head really, like a clumsy acrobat, rests

c

i8 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

on his hands also. The very terms " solipsism " and
" present moment " betray this impurity. An actual
intuition, which by hypothesis is fresh, absolute, and
not to be repeated, is called and is perhaps conceived
as an ipse, a self-same man. But identity (as I shall
have occasion to observe in discussing identity in
essences) implies two moments, two instances, or two
intuitions, between which it obtains. Similarly, a
" present moment " suggests other moments, and an
adventitious limitation either in duration or in scope ;
but the solipsist and his world (which are not dis
tinguishable) have by hypothesis no- environment
whatsoever, and nothing limits them save the fact
that there is nothing more. These irrelevances and
side glances are imported into the mind of the sceptic
because in fact he is retreating into solipsism from a
far more ambitious philosophy. A thought naturally
momentary would be immune from them.

A perfect solipsist, therefore, hardly is found
amongst men ; but some men are zealous in bringing
their criticism down to solipsism of the present moment
just because this attitude enables them to cast away
everything that is not present in their prevalent mood,
or in their deepest thought, and to set up this chosen
object as the absolute. Such a compensatory dogma
is itself not critical ; but criticism may help to raise
it to a specious eminence by lopping off everything
else. What remains will be different in different
persons : some say it is Brahma, some that it is Pure
Being, some that it is the Idea or Law of the moral
world. Each of these absolutes is the sacred residuum
which the temperament of different philosophers or
of different nations clings to, and will not criticise,
and in each case it is contrasted with the world in
which the vulgar believe, as something deeper, simpler,
and more real. Perhaps when solipsism of the present
moment is reached by a philosopher trained in abstrac-

WAYWARD SCEPTICISM 19

tion and inclined to ecstasy, his experience, at this
depth of concentration, will be that of an extreme
tension which is also liberty, an emptiness which is
intensest light ; and his denial of all natural facts and
events, which he will call illusions, will culminate in
the fervent assertion that all is One, and that One is
Brahma, or the breath of life. On the other hand, a
scientific observer and reasoner, who has pried into
substance, and has learned that all the aspects of
nature are relative and variable, may still not deny the
existence of matter in every object ; and this element
of mere intensity, drawn from the sense of mere
actuality in himself, may lead him to assert that pure
Being is, and everything else is not. Finally, a second
ary mind fed on books may drop the natural emphasis
which objects of sense have for the living animal, and
may retain, as the sole filling of its present moment,
nothing but the sciences. The philosopher will then
balance his denial of material facts by asserting the
absolute reality of his knowledge of them. This
reality, however, will extend no farther than his
information, as some intensest moment of recollection
may gather it together ; and his personal idea of the
world, so composed and so limited, will seem to him
the sole existence. His universe will be the after
image of his learning.

^We may notice that in these three instances scepti
cism has not suspended affirmation but has rather
intensified it, pouring it all on the cfevotecT head of
one chosen object. ~j There is a tireless and deafening
vehemence about these sceptical prophets ; it betrays
the poor old human Psyche labouring desperately
within them in the shipwreck of her native hopes, and
refusing to die. Her sacrifice, she believes, will be
her salvation, and she passionately identifies what
remains to her with all she has lost and by an audacious
falsehood persuades herself she has lost nothing.

20 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Thus the temper of these sceptics is not at all sceptical.
They take their revenge on the world, which eluded
them when they tried to prove its existence, by assert
ing the existence of the remnant which they have still
by them, insisting that this, and this only, is the true
and perfect world, and a much better one than that
false world in which the heathen trust. Such in
fatuation in the solipsist, however, is not inevitable ;
no such exorbitant credit need be given to the object,
perhaps a miserable one, which still fills the sceptical
mind, and a more dispassionate scepticism, while
contemplating that object, may disallow it.

CHAPTER IV

DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Do I know, can I know, anything ? Would not
knowledge be an impossible inclusion of what lies
outside ? May I not rather renounce all beliefs ? If
only I could, what peace would descend into my
perturbed conscience ! The spectacle of other men's
folly continually reawakens in me the suspicion that
I too am surely fooled ; and the character of the
beliefs which force themselves upon me — the fan
tasticality of space and time, the grotesque medley of
nature, the cruel mockery called religion, the sorry
history and absurd passions of mankind — all invite me
to disown them and to say to what I call the world,
" Come now ; how do you expect me to believe in
you ? " At the same time this very incredulity and
wonder in me are baseless and without credentials.
What right have I to any presumptions as to what
would be natural and proper ? Is not the most
extravagant fact as plausible as any other ? Is not the
most obvious axiom a wanton dogma ? Yet turn
whichever way I will, and refine as I may, the pressure
of existence, of tyrannical absolute present being,
seems to confront me. Something is evidently going
on, at least in myself. I feel an instant complex strain
of existence, forcing me to say that I think and that I
am. Certainly the words I use in such reflection bring
many images with them which may possess no truth.

21

22 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Thus when I say " I," the term suggests a man, one
of many living in a world contrasted with his thinking,
yet partly surveyed by it. These suggestions of the
word " I " might well be false. This thinking might
not belong to a member of the human family, and no
such race as this mankind that I am thinking of might
ever have existed. The natural world in which I
fancy that race living, among other races of animals,
might also be imaginary. Yet, in that case, what is
imagination ? Banish myself and my world as much
as I will, the present act of banishing them subsists
and is manifest ; and it was this act, now unrolling
itself consciously through various phases, not any
particular person in any environment, that I meant
when I said, " I find that I think and am."

In like manner the terms thinking and finding,
which I use for want of anything better, imply con
trasts and antecedents which I may disregard. It is
not a particular process called thinking, nor a par
ticular conjunction called finding, that I need assert
to exist, but merely this passing unrest, whatever you
choose to call it : these pulsations and phantoms which
to deny is to produce and to strive to banish is to
redouble.

It might seem for a moment as if this pressing
actuality of experience implied a relation between
subject and object, so that an indescribable being
called the ego or self was given with and involved in
any actual fact. This analysis, however, is merely
grammatical, and if pressed issues in mythical notions.
Analysis can never find in the object what, by hypo
thesis, is not there ; and the object, by definition, is
all that is found. But there is a biological truth,
discovered much later, under this alleged analytic
necessity : the truth that animal experience is a
product of two factors, antecedent to the experience
and not parts of it, namely, organ and stimulus, body

DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 23

and environment, person and situation. These two
natural conditions must normally come together, like
flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly.
But scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as
my point of departure, since it alone lives morally and
lights up with its vital flame the scene I seem to
discover. This spark is single, though changeful.
Experience has no conditions for a critic of knowledge
who proceeds transcendentally, that is, from the
vantage-ground of experience itself. To urge, there
fore, that a self or ego is presupposed in experience,
or even must have created experience by its absolute
fiat, is curiously to fail in critical thinking, and to
renounce the transcendental method. All transcend
ental system - makers are in fact false to the very
principle by which they criticise dogmatism ; a
principle which _admits of no system, tolerates no
belief, but recalls the universe qt every moment jptn
thf atvKilntr frnpfiripnrr whirh posits it here and now

This backsliding of transcendentalism, when it
forgets itself so far as to assign conditions to experience,
might have no serious consequences., jf transcend
entalism were clearly— recognised — to— he simply a

romantic episode JllTpflprtirm, a SOtt Of pnetir madnps^

' and~no necessary step in the life of reason. That its
"proTessed scepticism should so soon turn into mythology
would then seem appropriate in such a disease of genius.
But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious
critic of knowledge when it perhaps inclines him to
imagine that, in asserting that experience is a product,
and has two terms, he is describing the inner nature
of experience, and not merely its external conditions,
as natural history reports them. He may then be
tempted to assign a metaphysical status and logical
necessity to a merely material fact. Instead of the
body, which is the true "subject" in experience, he
may think he finds an absolute ego, and instead of the

24 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

natural environment of the body, which is the true
"object," he may think he finds an illimitable reality ;
and, to make things simpler, he may proceed to declare
that these two are one ; but all this is myth.

The fact of experience, then, is single and, from
its own point of view, absolutely unconditioned and
groundless, impossible to explain and impossible to
exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may
fade and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems
to do so ; and my hold on existence is not so firm
that non-existence does not seem always at hand and,
as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more
natural than existence. Yet this apprehension of an
imminent non-existence — an apprehension which is
itself an existing fact — cannot be trusted to penetrate
to a real nothingness yawning about me unless I assert
something not at all involved in the present being,
and something most remarkable, namely, that I know
and can survey the movement of my existence, and
that it can actually have lapsed from one state into
another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.

Thus the sense of a complex strain of existence,
the conviction that I am and that I am thinking,
involve a sense of at least possible change. I should
not speak of complexity nor of strain, if various opposed
developments into the not-given were not, to my
feeling, striving to take place. Doors are about to
open, cords to snap, blows to fall, pulsations to repeat
themselves. The flux and perspectives of being seem
to be open within me to my own intuition.

Caution is requisite here. All this may be simply
a present obsession, destitute of all prophetic or
retrospective truth, and carrying me no further, if I
wish to be honest, than a bare confession of how I
feel. Anything given in intuition is, by definition, an
appearance and nothing but an appearance. . Of course,
if I am a thorough sceptic, I may discredit the existence

DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 25

of anything else, so that this appearance will stand in
my philosophy as the only reality. But, then, I must
not enlarge nor interpret nor hypostatise it : I must
keep it as the mere picture it is, and revert to solipsism
of the present moment. One thing is the feeling that
something is happening, an intuition which finds
what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else.
Another thing is the belief that what is found is a
report or description of events that have happened
already, in such a manner that the earlier phases of
the flux I am aware of existed first, before the later
phases and without them ; whereas in my intuition
now the earlier phases are merely the first part of the
given whole, exist only together with the later phases,
and are earlier only in a perspective, not in a flux of
successive events. If anything had an actual beginning,
that first phase must have occurred out of relation
to the subsequent phases which had not yet arisen,
and only became manifest in the sequel : as the Old
Testament, if really earlier than the New Testament,
must have existed alone first, when it could not be
called old. If it had existed only in the Christian
Bible, under that perspective which renders and calls
it old, it would be old only speciously and for Christian
intuition, and all revelation would have been really
simultaneous. In a word, specious change is not
actual change. The unity of apperception which
yields the sense of change renders change specious, by
relating the terms and directions of change together in
a single perspective, as respectively receding, passing,
or arriving. In so uniting and viewing these terms,
intuition of change excludes actual change in the given
object. If change has been actual, it must have been
prior to, and independent of, the intuition of that
change.

Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of
change is itself lapsing, and yielding its place in

26 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

physical time to vacancy or to the intuition of change-
lessness ; and this lapse of the intuition in physical
time is an actual change. Evidently, however, it is
not a given change, since neither vacancy nor the
intuition of changelessness can reveal it. It is revealed,
if revealed at all, by a further intuition of specious
change taken as a report. Actual change, if it is to
be known at all, must be known by belief and not
by intuition. Doubt is accordingly always possible
regarding the existence of actual change. Having
renounced my faith in nature, I must not weakly
retain faith in experience. This intuition of change
might be false ; it might be the only fact in the uni
verse, and perfectly changeless. I should then be that
intuition, but it would not bring me any true knowledge
of anything actual. On the contrary, it would be an
illusion, presenting a false object, since it would
present nothing but change, when the only actual
reality, namely its own, was unchanging. On the
other hand, if this intuition of change was no illusion,
but a change was actually occurring and the universe
had passed into its present state out of a previous
state which was different (if, for instance, this very
intuition of change had grown more articulate or more
complex), I should then be right in hazarding a very
bold assertion, namely, that it is known to me that
what now is was not always, that there are things not
given, that there is genesis in nature, and that time
is real.

CHAPTER V

DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE

As I watch a sensible object the evidence of variation
is often irresistible. This flag is flapping. This
flame is dancing. How shall I deny that almost every
thing, in nature and in fancy, like the Ghost in Hamlet,
is here, is there, is gone ? Of course I witness these
appearances and disappearances. The intuition of
change is more direct and more imperious than any
other. But belief in change, as I found just now,
asserts that before this intuition of change arose the
first term of that change had occurred separately.
This no intuition of change can prove. The belief is
irresistible in animal perception, for reasons which
biology can plausibly assign ; and it cannot be long
suspended in actual thinking ; but it may be suspended
for a moment theoretically, in the interests of a thorough
criticism. The criticism too may prove persuasive.
Many solemn if not serious philosophers have actually
maintained that this irresistible assertion is false, and
that all diversity and change are illusion. In denying
time, multiplicity, and motion, their theory has harked
back — and it is no mean feat of concentration — almost
to the infancy of thought, and reversed the whole life
of reason. This mystical retraction of all the beliefs
necessary to life, and suspension, almost, of life itself,
have been sometimes defended by dialectical arguments,
to the effect that change is impossible, because the

27

28 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

idea of it is incoherent or self-contradictory. Such
arguments, however, are worthless for a critic of
knowledge, because they involve an assumption much
grosser than that which they discard. They assume
that if a thing is dialectically unintelligible, as change
is, or inexpressible in terms other than its own, it
cannot be true ; whereas, on the contrary, only when
dialectic passes its own frontiers and, fortified by a
passport countersigned by experience, enters the realm
of brute fact, has dialectic itself any claim to truth
or any relevance to the facts. Dialectical difficulties,
therefore, are irrelevant to valid knowledge, the terms
of which are irrational, no less than is their juxta
position in existence.

Th^denial of p^ange may reston more_jcerjdcal
grounds^ and may have a deeper ancl mo?e tragic
character. It may come from insight into the temerity
of asserting change. Why, indeed, do men believe in
it ? Because they see and feel it : but this fact is
not denied. They may see and feel all the changes
they like : what reason is that for believing that over
and above this actual intuition, with the specious
change it regards, one state of the universe has given
place to another, or different intuitions have existed ?
You feel you have changed ; you feel things changing ?
Granted. Does this fact help you to feel an earlier
state which you do not feel, which is not an integral
part of what is now before you, but a state from which
you are supposed to have passed into the state in
which you now are ? If you feel that earlier state
now, there is no change involved. That datum,
which you now designate as the past, and which exists
only in this perspective, is merely a term in your
present feeling. It was never anything else. It was
never given otherwise than as it is given now, when it
is given as past. Therefore, if things are such only
as intuition makes them, every suggestion of a past

DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE 29

is false. For if the event now called past was ever
actual and in its day a present event, then it is not
merely a term in the specious change now given in
intuition. Thus the feeling of movement, on which
you so trustfully rely, cannot vouch for the reality of
movement, I mean, for the existence of an actual
past, once present, and not identical with the specious
past now falling within the compass of intuition. By
a curious fatality, the more you insist on the sense of
change the more you hedge yourself in in the change
less and the immediate. There is no avenue to the
past or future, there is no room or breath for pro
gressive life, except through faith in the intellect and
in the reality of things not seen.

I think that if the sense of change, primordial and
continual as it is, were ever pure, this fact that in
itself it is changeless would not seem strange or
confusing : for evidently the idea of pure change
would be always the same, and changeless ;O* could
change only by yielding to the idea of rest or of
identity r*^ .Butin animalsjjf ja human_complexitythe
sense 6T" change^ia^neYgr pure : larger terms are
r> he permanent, and the change
these or the other ^
jsyt^ut

jKtTpicture . ^These lire matters of animal sensibility,
to be decideTd empirically — that is, never to be decided
at all. Every new animal is free to feel in a new way.
The gnat may begin with a sense of flux, like Heraclitus,
and only diffidently and sceptically ask himself what
it is that is rushing by ; and the barnacle may begin,
like Parmenides, with a sense of the unshakable
foundations of being, and never quite reconcile him
self to the thought that reality could ever move from
its solid bottom, or exchange one adhesion for another.
But, after all, the mind of Heraclitus, seeing nothing
but flux, would be as constant a mind as that of

30 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Parmenides, seeing nothing but rest ; and if the
philosophy of Heraclitus were the only one in the
world, there would be no change in the world of
philosophy.

Accordingly, when I have removed the instinctive
belief in an environment beyond the given scene, and
in a past and future beyond the specious present, the
lapse in this specious present itself and the sensible
events within it lose all the urgency of actual motions.
They become pictures of motions and ideas of events :
I no longer seem to live in a changing world, but an
illusion of change seems to play idly before me, and
to be contained in my changelessness. This pictured
change is a particular quality of being, as is pain or
a sustained note, not a passage from one quality of
being to another, since the part called earlier never
disappears and the part called later is given from the
first. Events, and the reality of change they involve,
may therefore be always illusions. The sceptic can
ultimately penetrate to the vision of a reality from
which they should be excluded. All he need do, in
order to attain to this immunity from illusion, is to
extirpate from his own nature every vestige of anxiety,
not to regret nor to fear nor to attempt anything. If
he can accomplish this he has exorcised belief in
change.

Moreover, the animal compulsion to believe in
change may not only be erroneous, but it may not
operate at all times. I may remain alive, and be
actually changing, and yet this change in me, remain
ing unabated, may be undiscerned. Very quick
complete changes, cutting up existence into discrete
instants, the inner order of which would not be trans
mitted from one to the other, would presumably
exclude memory. There would be no intuition of
change, and therefore not even a possible belief in it.
A certain actual persistence is requisite to perceive

DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE 31

a flux, and an absolute flux, in which nothing was
carried over from moment to moment, would yield,
in each of these moments, nothing but an intuition
of permanence. So far is the actual instability of
things, even if I admit it, from involving a sense of
it, or excluding a sense of its opposite. I may, there
fore, occasionally deny it ; and nothing can persuade
me, during those moments, that my insight then is
not truer than at other times, when I perceive and
believe in change. The mystic must confess that he
spends most of his life in the teeming valleys of
illusion : but he may still maintain that truth and reality
are disclosed to him only on those almost inaccessible
mountain tops, where only the One and Changeless
is visible. That the believer in nature perceives
that this mystical conviction is itself a natural event,
and a very ticklish and unstable illusion, does not
alter that conviction while it lasts, nor enter into
its deliverance : so that under its sway the mystic
may disallow all change and multiplicity, either
virtually by forgetting it, or actually by demonstrating
it to be false and impossible. Being without irrational
expectation (and all expectation is irrational) and
without belief in memory (which is a sort of expectation
reversed), he will lack altogether that sagacity which
makes the animal believe in latent events and latent
substances, on which his eventual action might operate ;
and his dialectic not being rebuked by any contrary
buffets of experience, he will prove to his heart's
content that change is unthinkable. For if discrete
altogether, without a continuous substance or medium,
events will not follow one another, but each will
simply exist absolutely ; and if a substance or medium
be posited, no relation can be conceived to obtain
between it and the events said to diversify it : for in
so far as the substance or medium permeates the
events nothing will happen or change ; and in so far

32 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

as the events really occur and are not merely specious
changes given in one intuition, they will be discrete
altogether, without foothold in that medium or sub
stance postulated in vain to sustain them. Thus the
mystic, on the wings of a free dialectic, will be wafted
home to his ancient and comforting assurance that all
is One, that Being is, and that Non-Being is not.

CHAPTER VI

ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM

WHY should the mystic, in proportion as he dismisses
the miscellany of experience as so much illusion, feel
that he becomes one with reality and attains to absolute
existence ? I think that the same survival of vulgar
presumptions which leads the romantic solipsist to
retain his belief in his personal history and destiny,
leads the mystic to retain, and fondly to embrace, the
feeling of existence. His speculation is indeed inspired
by the love of security : his grand objection to the
natural world, and to mortal life, is that they are
deceptive, that they cheat the soul that loves them,
and prove to be illusions : the assumption apparently
bf ing -that reality, must J^^^~^^^__^^ thatHFvp
who hashold on reality is sate fnr"ever. In this the
mystic, who so hates illusions, is the victim of an
illusion himself : for the reality he has hold of is but
the burden of a single moment, which in its solipsism
thinks itself absolute. What is reality ? As I should
like to use the term, reality is being of any sort. If it
means character or essence, illusions have it as much
as substance, and more richly. If it means substance,
then sceptical concentration upon inner experience,
or ecstatic abstraction, seems to me the last place in
which we should look for it. The immediate and the
visionary are at the opposite pole from substance ;
they are on the surface or, if you like, at the top ;

33 D

34 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

whereas substance if it is anywhere is at the bottom.
The realm of immediate illusion is as real as any other,
and very attractive ; many would wish it to be the
only reality, and hate substance ; but if substance
exists (which I am not yet ready to assert) they have
no reason to hate it, since it is the basis of those
immediate feelings which fill them with satisfaction.
Finally, if reality means existence, certainly the mystic
and his meditation may exist, but not more truly
than any other natural fact ; and what wrould exist
in them would be a pulse of animal being, kindling
that momentary ecstasy, as animal life at certain
intensities is wont to do. The theme of that meditation,
its visionary object, need not exist at all ; it may be
incapable of existing if it is essentially timeless and
dialectical. The animal mind treats its data as facts,
or as signs of facts, but the animal mind is full of the
rashest presumptions, positing time, change, a parti
cular station in the midst of events yielding a particular
perspective of those events, and the flux of all nature
precipitating that experience at that place. None of
these posited objects is a datum in which a sceptic
could rest. Indeed, existence or fact, in the sense
which I give to these words, cannot be a datum at all,
because existence involves external relations and actual
(not merely specious) flux : whereas, however complex
a datum may be, with no matter what perspectives
opening within it, it must be embraced in a single
stroke of apperception, and nothing outside it can
belong to it at all. The datum is a pure image ; it is
essentially illusory and unsubstantial, however thunder
ous its sound or keen its edge, or howrever normal
and significant its presence may be. When the
mystic asserts enthusiastically the existence of his
immediate, ideal, unutterable object, Absolute Being,
he is peculiarly unfortunate in his faith : it would be
impossible to choose an image less relevant to the

ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM 35

agencies that actually bring that image before him.
The burden and glow of existence which he is conscious
of come entirely from himself ; his object is eminently
empty, impotent, non-existent ; but the heat and
labour of his own soul suffuse that emptiness with
light, and the very hum of change within him, ac
celerated almost beyond endurance and quite beyond
discrimination, sounds that piercing note.

The last step in scepticism is now before me. It
will lead me to deny existence to any datum, whatever
it may be ; and as the datum, by hypothesis, is the
whole of what solicits my attention at any moment, I
shall deny the existence of everything, and abolish
that category of thought altogether. If I could not
do this, I should be a tyro in scepticism. Belief in
the existence of anything, including myself, is some
thing radically incapable of proof, and resting, like
all belief, on some irrational persuasion or prompting
of life. Certainly, as a matter of fact, when I deny
existence I exist ; but doubtless many of the other
facts I have been denying, because I found no evidence
for them, were true also. To bring me evidence of
their existence is no duty imposed on facts, nor a
habit of theirs : I must employ private detectives.
The point is, in this task of criticism, to discard every
belief that is a belief merely ; and the belief in existence,
in the nature of the case, can be a belief only. The
datum is an idea, a description ; I may contemplate
it without belief ; but when I assert that such a thing
exists I am hypostatising this datum, placing it in
presumptive relations which are not internal to it,
and worshipping it as an idol or thing. Neither its
existence nor mine nor that of my belief can be given
in any datum. These things are incidents involved
in that order of nature which I have thrown over ;
they are no part of what remains before me.

Assurance of existence expresses animal watchful-

36 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

ness : it posits, within me and round me, hidden and
imminent events. The sceptic can easily cast a doubt
on the remoter objects of this belief ; and nothing but
a certain obduracy and want of agility prevents him
from doubting present existence itself. For what could
present existence mean, if the imminent events for
which animal sense is watching failed altogether,
failed at the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of
intuition, and left nothing but its branches flowering
in vacuo ? Expectation is admittedly the most hazard
ous of beliefs : yet what is watchfulness but expecta
tion ? Memory is notoriously full of illusion ; yet
what would experience of the present be if the veracity
of primary memory were denied, and if I no longer
believed that anything had just happened, or that I
had ever been in the state from which I suppose
myself to have passed into this my present condition ?
It will not do for the sceptic to take refuge in the
confused notion that expectation possesses the future,
or memory the past. As a matter of fact, expectation
is like hunger ; it opens its mouth, and something
probably drops into it, more or less, very often, the
sort of thing it expected ; but sometimes a surprise
comes, and sometimes nothing. Life involves ex
pectation, but does not prevent death : and expectation
is never so thoroughly stultified as when it is not
undeceived, but cancelled. The open mouth does
not then so much as close upon nothing. It is buried
open. Nor is memory in a better case. As the
whole world might collapse and cease at any moment,
nullifying all expectation, so it might at any moment
have sprung out of nothing : for it is thoroughly
contingent, and might have begun to-day, with this
degree of complexity and illusive memory, as well as
long ago, with whatever energy or momentum it was
first endowed with. The backward perspective of
time is perhaps really an inverted expectation ; but

ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM 37

for the momentum of life forward, we might not be
able to space the elements active in the present so as
to assign to them a longer or a shorter history ; for
we should not attempt to discriminate amongst these
elements such as we could still count on in the im
mediate future, and such as we might safely ignore :
so that our conception of the past implies, perhaps, a
distinction between the living and the dead. This
distinction is itself practical, and looks to the future.
In the absolute present all is specious ; and to pure
intuition the living are as ghostly as the dead, and the
dead as present as the living.

In the sense of existence there is accordingly
something more than the obvious character of that
which is alleged to exist. What is this complement ?
It cannot be a feature in the datum, since the datum
by definition is the whole of what is found. Nor can
it be, in my sense at least of the word existence, the
intrinsic constitution or specific being of this object,
since existence comports external relations, variable,
contingent, and not discoverable in a given being
when taken alone : for there is nothing that may not
lose its existence, or the existence of which might not
be conceivably denied. The complement added to
the datum when it is alleged to exist seems, then, to
be added by me ; it is the finding, the occurrence, the
assault, the impact of that being here and now ; it is
the experience of it. But what can experience be,
if I take away from it the whole of what is experienced ?
And what meaning can I give to such words as impact,
assault, occurrence, or finding, when I have banished
and denied my body, my past, my residual present
being, and everything except the datum which I find ?
The sense of existence evidently belongs to the
intoxication, to the Rausch, of existence itself ; it is
the strain of life within me, prior to all intuition, that
in its precipitation and terror, passing as it continually

38 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

must from one untenable condition to another, stretches
my attention absurdly over what is not given, over
the lost and the unattained, the before and after
which are wrapped in darkness, and confuses my
breathless apprehension of the clear presence of all I
can ever truly behold.

Indeed, so much am I a creature of movement,
and of the ceaseless metabolism of matter, that I
should never catch even these glimpses of the light,
if there were not rhythms, pauses, repetitions, and
nodes in my physical progress, to absorb and reflect
it here and there : as the traveller, hurried in a cloud
of smoke and dust through tunnel after tunnel in the
Italian Riviera, catches and loses momentary visions
of blue sea and sky, which he would like to arrest,
but cannot ; yet if he had not been rushed and whistled
along these particular tunnels, even those snatches, in
the form in which they come to him, would have been
denied him. So it is the rush of life that, at its open
moments, floods me with intuitions, partial and
confused, but still revelations ; the landscape is
wrapped in the smoke of my little engine, and turned
into a tantalising incident of my hot journey. What
appears (\vhich is an ideal object and not an event)
is thus confused with the event of its appearance ;
the picture is identified with the kindling or distraction
of my attention falling by chance upon it ; and the
strain of my material existence, battling with material
accidents, turns the ideal object too into a temporal
fact, and makes it seem substantial. But this fugitive
existence which I egotistically attach to it, as if its
fate was that of my glimpses of it, is no part of its
true being, as even my intuition discerns it ; it is a
practical dignity or potency attributed to it by the
irrelevant momentum of my animal life. Animals,
being by nature hounded and hungry creatures, spy
out and take alarm at any datum of sense or fancy,

ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM 39

supposing that there is something substantial there,
something that will count and work in the world.
The notion of a moving world is brought implicitly
with them ; they fetch it out of the depths of their
vegetating psyche, which is a small dark cosmos,
silently revolving within. By being noticed, and
treated as a signal for I know not what material op
portunity or danger, the given image is taken up into
the business world, and puts on the garment of
existence. Remove this frame, strip off all suggestion
of a time when this image was not yet present, or a,
time when it shall be past, and the very notion of
existence is removed. The datum ceases to be an
appearance, in the proper and pregnant sense of this
word, since it ceases to imply any substance that
appears or any mind to which it appears. It is an
appearance only in the sense that its nature is wholly
manifest, that it is a specific being, which may be
mentioned, thought of, seen, or defined, if any one
has the wit to do so. But its own nature says nothing
of any hidden circumstances that shall bring it to
light, or any adventitious mind that shall discover it.
It lies simply in its own category. If a colour, it is
just this colour ; if a pain, just this pain. Its appear
ance is not an event : its presence is not an experience ;
for there is no surrounding world in which it can
arise, and no watchful spirit to appropriate it. ^The
sreptjc frag herfr withdrawn into the intuition of_JL
formr without roots, without origin or environ
ment, without a seat or alocus
immaterial absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own
quality. This theme, being out of all adventitious
relations and not in the least threatened with not
being the theme it is, has not the contingency nor the
fortunes proper to an existence ; it is simply that
which it inherently, logically, and unchangeably is.
Existence, then, not being included in any

40 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

immediate datum, is a fact always open to doubt. I
call it a fact notwithstanding, because in talking about
the sceptic I am positing his existence. If he has any
intuition, however little the theme of that intuition
may have to do with any actual wrorld, certainly I who
think of his intuition, or he himself thinking of it
afterwards, see that this intuition of his must have
been an event, and his existence at that time a fact ;
but like all facts and events, this one can be known
only by an affirmation which posits it, which may be
suspended or reversed, and which is subject to error.
Hence all this business of intuition may perfectly well
be doubted by the sceptic : the existence of his own
doubt (however confidently I may assert it for him)
is not given to him then : all that is given is some
ambiguity or contradiction in images ; and if after
wards he is sure that he has doubted, the sole cogent
evidence which that fact can claim lies in the psycho
logical impossibility that, so long as he believes he has
doubted, he should not believe it. But he may be
wrong in harbouring this belief, and he may rescind
it. For all an ultimate scepticism can see, therefore,
there may be no facts at all, and perhaps nothing has
ever existed.

Scepticism may thus be carried to the point of
denying change and memory, and the reality of all
facts. Such a sceptical dogma would certainly be
false, because this dogma itself would have to be
entertained, and that event would be a fact and an
existence : and the sceptic in framing that dogma
discourses, vacillates, and lives in the act of contrasting
one assertion with another— all of which is to exist
with a vengeance. Yet this false dogma that nothing
exists is tenable intuitively and, while it prevails, is
irrefutable. fThere are certain motives (to be dis
cussed later) which render ultimate scepticism precious
to a spiritual mind, as a sanctuary from grosser illusions.

ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM 41

|in regards it as no truer,

w

ome utility : it

accustoms him to discard the dogma wfncTTaurtfitro-
spective critic might be tempted to think self-evident,
namely, that he himself lives and thinks. That he
does so is true ; but to establish that truth he must
appeal to animal faith. If he is too proud for that,
and simply stares at the datum, the last thing he will
see is himself.

CHAPTER VII

NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS

SCEPTICISM is not sleep, and in casting a doubt on
any belief, or proving the absurdity of any idea, the
sceptic is by no means losing his sense of what is
proposed. He is merely doubting or denying the
existence of any such object. In scepticism, therefore,
everything turns on the meaning of the word existence,
and it will be worth while to stop a moment here to
consider it further.

I have already indicated roughly how I am using
the word existence, namely, to designate such being
as is in flux, determined by external relations, and
jostled by irrelevant events. Of course this is no
definition. The term existence is only a name. In
using it I am merely pointing out to the reader, as if
by a gesture, what this word designates in my habits
of speech, as if in saying Caesar I pointed to my dog,
lest some one should suppose I meant the Roman
emperor. The Roman emperor, the dog, and the
sound Caesar are all indefinable ; but they might be
described more particularly, by using other indicative
and indefinable names, to mark their characteristics
or the events in which they figured. So the whole
realm of being which I point to when I say existence
might be described more fully ; the description of it
would be physics or perhaps psychology ; but the

42

NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS 43

exploration of that realm, which is open only to
animal faith, would not concern the sceptic.

The sceptic turns from such indefinite confusing
objects to the immediate, to the datum ; and perhaps
for a moment he may fancy he has found true existence
there ; but if he is a good sceptic he will soon be
undeceived. Certainly in the immediate he will find
freedom from the struggle of assertion and counter-
assertion : no report there, no hypothesis, no ghostly
reduplication of the obvious, no ghostly imminence
of the not-given. Is not the obvious, he might ask,
the truly existent ? Yet the obvious is only the
apparent ; and this in both senses of this ambiguous
word. The datum is apparent in the sense of being
self-evident and luminous ; and it is apparent also in
the sense of merely appearing and being unsubstantial.
In this latter sense, the apparent threatens to become
the non-existent. Does not the existent profess to
be more than apparent : to be not so much the self-
evident as that which I am seeking evidence for, in
the sense of testimony ? Is not the existent, then
(which from its own point of view, or physically, is
more than the apparent), cognitively and from my
point of view less than the apparent ? Does it not
need witnesses to bear testimony to its being ? And
what can recommend those witnesses to me except
their intrinsic eloquence ? I shall prove no sceptic
if I do not immediately transfer all my trust from the
existence reported to the appearance reporting it, and
substitute the evidence of my senses for all lawyer's
evidence. I shall forget the murders and embroglios
talked about in the court, and gaze at the judge in his
scarlet and ermine, with the pale features of an old
fox under his grey wig ; at the jury in their stolidity ;
at the witness stammering ; at the counsel, officially
insolent, not thinking of what he is saying mechanic
ally, but whispering something that really interests

44 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

him in an aside, almost yawning, and looking at the
clock to see if it is time for luncheon ; and at the flood
of hazy light falling aslant on the whole scene from the
high windows. Is not the floating picture, in my
waking trance, the actual reality, and the whole world
of existence and business but a perpetual fable, which
this trance sustains ?

The theory that the universe is nothing but a flux
of appearances is plausible to the sceptic ; he thinks
he is not believing much in believing it. Yet the
residuum of dogma is very remarkable in this view ;
and the question at once will assail him how many
appearances he shall assert to exist, of what sort, and
in what order, if in any, he shall assert them to arise ;
and the various hypotheses that may be suggested
concerning the character and distribution of appear
ances will become fresh data in his thought ; and he
will find it impossible to decide whether any such
appearances, beyond the one now passing before him,
are ever actual, or whether any of the suggested
systems of appearances actually exists. Thus existence
will loom again before him, as something problematical,
at a distance from that immediacy into which he
thought he had fled.

Existence thus seems to re-establish itself in the
very world of appearances, so soon as these are regarded
as facts and events occurring side by side or one after
the other. In each datum taken separately there would
be no occasion to speak of existence. It would be
an obvious appearance ; whatever appeared there
would be simply and wholly apparent, and the fact
that it appeared (which would be the only fact in
volved) would not appear in it at all. This fact, the
existence of the intuition, would not be asserted until
the appearance ceased to be actual, and was viewed
from the outside, as something that presumably had
occurred, or would occur, or was occurring elsewhere.

NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS 45

In such an external view there might be truth or error ;
not so in each appearance taken in itself, because in
itself and as a whole each is a pure appearance and
bears witness to nothing further. Nevertheless, when
some term within this given appearance comes to be
regarded as a sign of some other appearance not now
given, the question is pertinent whether that other
appearance exists or not. Thus existence and non-
existence seem to be relevant to appearances in so far
as they are problematical and posited from outside,
not in so far as they are certain and given.

Hence an important conclusion which at first
seems paradoxical but which reflection will support ;
namely, that the notion that the datum exists is un
meaning, and if insisted upon is false. That which
exists is the fact that the datum is given at that parti
cular moment and crisis in the universe ; the intuition,
not the datum, is the fact which occurs ; and this fact,
if known at all, must be asserted at some other moment
by an adventurous belief which may be true or false.
That which is certain and given, on the contrary, is
something of which existence cannot be predicated,
and which, until it is used as a description of some
thing else, cannot be either false or true.

I see here how halting is the scepticism of those
modern philosophers who have supposed that to
exist is to be an idea in the mind, or an object of
consciousness, or a fact of experience, if by these
phrases no more is meant than to be a datum of
intuition. If there is any existence at all, presence to
consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient to
render it an existence. Imagine a novelist whose
entire life was spent in conceiving a novel, or a deity
whose only function was to think a world. That
world would not exist, any more than the novel
would comprise the feelings and actions of existing
persons. If that novelist, in the heat of invention,

46 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

believed his personages real, he would be deceived :
and so would that deity if he supposed his world to
exist merely because he thought of it. Before the
creation could be actual, or the novel historical, it
would have to be enacted elsewhere than in the mind
of its author. And if it was so enacted, it would
evidently not be requisite to its existence that any
imaginative person, falsely conceiving himself to be
its author, should form an image of it in his mind. If
he did so, that remarkable clairvoyance would be a
fact requiring explanation ; but it would be an added
harmony in the world, not the ground of its existence.
If for the sake of argument I accept the notion
that presence to intuition is existence, I may easily
disprove it by a reductio ad absurdum. If nothing not
given in intuition can exist, then all those beliefs in
existing facts beyond my intuition, by which thought
is diversified when it is intelligent, would be necessarily
false, and all intelligence would be illusion. This
implication might be welcome to me, if I wished not
to entertain any opinions which might conceivably be
wrong. But the next implication is more disconcert
ing, namely, that the intuitions in which such illusion
appears can have no existence themselves : for being
instances of intuition they could not be data for any
intuition. At one moment I may believe that there
are or have been or will be other moments ; but
evidently they would not be other moments, if they
were data to me now, and nothing more. If presence
to intuition were necessary to existence, intuition itself
would not exist ; that is, no other intuition would be
right in positing it ; and as this absence of tran
scendence would be mutual, nothing would exist at
all. And yet, since presence to intuition would be
sufficient for existence, everything mentionable would
exist without question, the non-existent could never
be thought of, to deny anything (if I knew what I was

NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS 47

denying) would be impossible, and there would be
no such thing as fancy, hallucination, illusion, or
error.

I think it is evidently necessary to revise a vocabulary
which lends itself to such equivocation, and if I keep
the words existence and intuition at all, to lend them
meanings which can apply to something possible and
credible. I therefore propose to use the word exist
ence (in a way consonant, on the whole, with ordinary
usage) to designate not data of intuition but facts or
events believed to occur in nature. These facts or
events will include, first, intuitions themselves, or
instances of consciousness, like pains and pleasures
and all remembered experiences and mental discourse ;
and second, physical things and events, having a
transcendent relation to the data of intuition which, in
belief, may be used as signs for them ; the same
transcendent relation which objects of desire have to
desire, or objects of pursuit to pursuit ; for example,
such a relation as the fact of my birth (which I cannot
even remember) has to my present persuasion that I
was once born, or the event of my death (which I
conceive only abstractly) to my present expectation of
some day dying. If an angel visits me, I may in
telligibly debate the question whether he exists or not.
On the one hand, I may affirm that he came in through
the door, that is, that he existed before I saw him ;
and I may continue in perception, memory, theory,
and expectation to assert that he was a fact of nature :
in that case I believe in his existence. On the other
hand, I may suspect that he was only an event in me,
called a dream ; an event not at all included in the
angel as I saw him, nor at all like an angel in the
conditions of its existence ; and in this case I disbelieve
in my vision : for visiting angels cannot honestly be
said to exist if I entertain them only in idea.

Existences, then, from the point of view of know-

48 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

ledge, are facts or events affirmed, not images seen or
topics merely entertained. Existence is accordingly
not only doubtful to the sceptic, but odious to the
logician. To him it seems a truly monstrous
excrescence and superfluity in being, since anything
existent is more than the description of it, having
suffered an unintelligible emphasis or materialisation
to fall upon it, which is logically inane and morally
comic. At the same time, existence suffers from
defect of being and obscuration ; any ideal nature,
such as might be exhaustively given in intuition, when
it is materialised loses the intangibility and eternity
proper to it in its own sphere ; so that existence
doubly injures the forms of being it embodies, by
ravishing them first and betraying them afterwards.

Such is existence as approached by belief and
affirmed in animal experience ; but I shall find in the
sequel that considered physically, as it is unrolled
amidst the other realms of being, existence is a con
junction of natures in adventitious and variable
relations. According to this definition, it is evident
that existence can never be given in intuition ; since
no matter how complex a datum may be, and no
matter how many specious changes it may picture, its
specious order and unity are just what they are :
they can neither suffer mutation nor acquire new
relations : which is another way of saying that they
cannot exist. If this whole evolving world were
merely given in idea, and were not an external object
posited in belief and in action, it could not exist nor
evolve. In order to exist it must enact itself ignorantly
and^successively, and carry down all ideas of it in its
own current.

CHAPTER VIII

SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION

THE ultimate position of the sceptic, that nothing
given exists, may be tortiried by the authority of many
renowned philosophers who jy£_accoimted orthodox..:
and it will be worth while to stopror a moment to
invoke their support, since the scepticism I am defend
ing is not meant to be merely provisional ; its just
conclusions will remain fixed, to remind me perpetually
that all alleged knowled0^ pf ^attfira of fact is faith
pnlv,jmd that an existing world, whatever form it may
choose to wear, is intrinsically a questionable and
arbitrary thing. It is true that many who have
defended this view, in the form that all appearance is
illusion, have done so in order to insist all the more
stoutly on the existence of something occult which
they call reality ; but as the existence of this reality is
far easier to doubt than the existence of the obvious,
I may here disregard that compensatory dogma. I
shall soon introduce compensatory dogmas of my own,
more credible, I think, than theirs ; and I shall
attribute existence to a flux of natural events which
can never be data of intuition, but only objects of a
belief which men and animals, caught in that flux
themselves, hazard instinctively. Although a sceptic
may doubt all existence, none being involved in any
indubitable datum, yet I think good human reasons,
apart from irresistible impulse, can be found for

49 E

50 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

positing existing intuitions to which data appear, no
less than other existing events and things, which the
intuited data report or describe. For the moment,
however, I am concerned to justify further the con
tention of the sceptic that, if we refuse to bow to the
yoke of animal faith, we can find in pure intuition no
evidence of any existence whatsoever.

There is notably one tenet, namely, that all change
is illusion, proper to many deep-voiced philosophers,
which of itself suffices to abolish all existence, in the
sense which I give to this word. Instead of change
they probably posit changeless substance or pure
Being ; but if substance were not subject to change,
at least in its distribution, it would not be the substance
of anything found in the world or happening in the
mind ; it would, therefore, have no more lodgement
in existence than has pure Being, which is evidently
only a logical term. Pure Being, as far as it goes, is
no doubt a true description of everything, whether
existent or non-existent ; so that if anything exists,
pure Being will exist in it ; but it will exist merely as
pure colour does in all colours, or pure space in all
spaces, and not separately nor exclusively. These
philosophers, in denying change, accordingly deny all
existence. But though many of them have prized
this doctrine, few have lived up to it, or rather none
have ; so that I may pass over the fact that in denying
change they have inadvertently denied existence, even
to substance and pure Being, because they have
inadvertently retained both existence and change.
The reality they attributed with so much unction and
conviction to the absolute was not that proper to this
idea — one of the least impressive which it is possible
to contemplate — but was obviously due to the strain
of existence and movement within themselves, and to
the vast rumble, which hypnotised them, of universal
mutation.

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 51

It is the Indians who have insisted most sincerely
and intrepidly on the non-existence of everything
given, even adjusting their moral regimen to this
insight. Life is a dream, they say : and all experienced
events are illusions. In dreaming of nature and of
ourselves we are deceived, even in imagining that we
exist and are deceived and dreaming. Some aver,
indeed, that there is a universal dreamer, Brahma,
slumbering and breathing deeply in all of us, who is
the reality of our dreams, and the negation of them.
But as Brahma is emphatically not qualified by any
of the forms of illusory existence, but annuls them all,
there is no need, for my purpose, of distinguishing
him from the reported state of redeemed souls (where
many souls are admitted) nor from the Nirvana into
which lives flow when they happily cease, becoming
at last aware, as it were, that neither they nor anything
else has ever existed.

It would be rash, across the chasm of language
and tradition that separates me from the Indians, to
accuse their formidable systems of self-contradiction.
Truth and reality are words which, in the mouths of
prophets, have often a eulogistic rather than a scientific
force ; and if it is better to elude the importunities of
existence and to find a sanctuary of intense safety and
repose in the notion of pure Being, there may be a
dramatic propriety in saying that the view of the
saved, from which all memory of the path to salvation
is excluded, is the true view, and their condition the
only reality ; so that they are right in thinking that
they have never existed, and we wrong in thinking
that we now exist.

Here is an egotism of the redeemed with which,
as with other egotisms, I confess I have little sympathy.
The blessed, in giving out that I do not exist in my
sins, because they cannot distinguish me, appear to
me to be deceived. The intrinsic blessedness of their

52 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

condition cannot turn into a truth this small oversight
on their part, however excusable. I suspect, or I like
to imagine, that what the Indians mean is rather that
the principle of my existence, and of my persuasion
that I exist, is an evil principle. It is sin, guilt,
passion, and mad will, the natural and universal source
of illusion — very much what I am here calling animal
faith ; and since this assertiveness in me (according
to the Indians) is wrong morally, and since its influence
alone leads me to posit existence in myself or in
anything else, if I were healed morally I should cease
to assert existence ; and I should, in fact, have ceased
to exist.

Now in this doctrine, so stated, lies a great con
firmation of my thesis that nothing given exists ;
because it is only a dark principle, transcendental in
respect to the datum (that is, on the hither side of the
footlights) that calls up this datum at all, or leads me
to posit its existence. It is this sorry self of mine
sitting here in the dark, one in this serried pack of
open-mouthed fools, hungry for illusion, that is
responsible for the spectacle ; for if a foolish instinct
had not brought me to the playhouse, and if avid eyes
and an idealising understanding had not watched the
performance, no part of it would have abused me :
and if no one came to the theatre, the actors would
soon flit away like ghosts, the poets would starve, the
scenery would topple over and become rubbish, and
the very walls would disappear. Every part of ex
perience, as it comes, is illusion ; and the source of
this illusion is my animal nature, blindly labouring in
a blind world.

Such is the ancient lesson of experience itself,
when we reflect upon experience and turn its illusions
into instruction : a lesson which a bird-witted empiri
cism can never learn, though it is daily repeated. But
the Indian with a rare sensitiveness joined a rare

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 53

recollection. He lived : a religious love, a childish
absorption in appearances as they come (which busy
empiricists do not share), led him to remember them
truly, in all their beauty, and therefore to perceive
that they were illusions. The poet, the disinterested
philosopher, the lover of things distilled into purity,
frees himself from belief. This infinite chaos of cruel
and lovely forms, he cries, is all deceptive, all un
substantial, substituted at will for nothing, and soon
found to sink into nothing again, and to be nothing
in truth.

I will disregard the vehemence with which these
saintly scholastics denounce the world and the sinful
nature that attaches me to it. I like the theatre, not
because I cannot perceive that the play is a fiction,
but because I do perceive it ; if I thought the thing a
fact, I should detest it : anxiety would rob me of all
my imaginative pleasure. Even as it is, I often wish
the spectacle were less barbarous ; but I am not
angry because each scene does not last for ever, and
is likely to be followed by a thousand others which
I shall not witness. Such is the nature of endless
comedy, and of experience. But I wish to retain the
valuable testimony of the Indians to the non-existence
of the obvious. This testimony is the more valuable
because the spectacle present to their eyes was tropical ;
harder, therefore, to master and to smile at than are
the political and romantic medleys which fill the mind
of Europe. Yet amidst the serpents and hyaenas, the
monkeys and parrots of their mental jungle, those
sages could sit unmoved, too holily incredulous for
fear. How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of
forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of under
standing, that loves only in pity, and has no con
cupiscence for what it loves ! How like unhappy
animals western philosophers seem in comparison,
with their fact-worship, their thrift, their moral

54 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

intolerance, their imaginative poverty, their political
zeal, and their subservience to intellectual fashion !

It makes no difference for my purposes if the
cosmology of the Indians was fanciful. It could
hardly be more extraordinary than the constitution
of the material world is in fact, nor more decidedly
out of scale with human data ; truth and fancy in this
matter equally convict the human senses of illusion.
Nor am I out of sympathy with their hope of escaping
from the universal hurly-burly into some haven of
peace. A philosopher has a haven in himself, of
which I suspect the fabled bliss to follow in other
lives, or after total emancipation from living, is only
a poetic symbol : he has pleasure in truth, and an
equal readiness to enjoy the scene or to quit it. Libera
tion is never complete while life lasts, and is nothing
afterwards ; but it flows in a measure from this very
conviction that all experience is illusion, when this
conviction is morally effective, as it was with the
Indians. Their belief in transmigration or in Karma
is superfluous in this regard, since a later experience
could only change the illusion without perfecting the
liberation. Yet the mention of some ulterior refuge
or substance is indispensable to the doctrine of illusion,
and though it may be expressed mythically must be
taken to heart too. It points to other realms of being
—such as those which I call the realms of matter,
truth, and spirit — which by nature cannot be data of
intuition but must be posited (if recognised by man
at all) by an instinctive faith expressed in action.
Whether these ulterior realms exist or not is their
own affair : existence may be proper to some, like
matter or spirit, and not to others, like truth. But as
to the data of intuition, their non-existent and illusory
character is implied in the fact that they are given.
A datum is by definition a theme of attention, a term
in passing thought, a visioned universal. The realm

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 55

in which it lies, and in which flying intuition discloses
it for a moment, is the very realm of non-existence,
of inert or ideal being. The Indians, in asserting the
non-existence of every term in possible experience,
not only free the spirit from idolatry, but free the realm
of spirit (which is that of intuition) from limitation ;
because if nothing that appears exists, anything may
appear without the labour and expense of existing ;
and fancy is invited to range innocently — fancies not
murdering other fancies as an existence must murder
other existences. While life lasts, the field is thus
cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis,
without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor
the heart enslaved.

European philosophers, even when called idealists,
have seldom reconciled themselves to regarding ex
perience as a creature of fancy. Instead of looking
beneath illusion for some principle that might call it
forth or perhaps dispel it, as they would if endeavour
ing to interpret a dream, they have treated it as dreams
are treated by the superstitious ; that is, they have
supposed that the images they saw were themselves
substances, or powers, or at least imperfect visions of
originals resembling them. In other words, they have
been empiricists, regarding appearances as constituents
of substance. There have been exceptions, but some
of them only prove the rule. Parmenides and Demo-
critus certainly did not admit that the data of sense or
imagination existed otherwise than as illusions or
conventional signs : but their whole interest, for this
reason, skipped over them, and settled heavily on
" Being," or on the atoms and the void, which they
severally supposed underlay appearance. Appearance
itself thereby acquired a certain vicarious solidity,
since it was thought to be the garment of substance ;
somehow within the visionary datum, or beneath it,
the most unobjectionable substance was always to be

56 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

found. Parmenides could not have admitted, and
Democritus had not discovered, that the sole basis of
appearances was some event in the brain, in no way
resembling them ; and that the relation of data to
the external events they indicated was that of a
spontaneous symbol, like an exclamatory word, and
not that of a copy or emanation. The simple ancients
supposed (as some of my contemporaries do also) that
perception stripped material things of their surface
properties, or was actually these surface properties
peeled off and lodged in the observer's head. Accord
ingly the denial of existence to sensibles and to intelli-
gibles was never hearty until substance was denied
also, and nothing existent was any longer supposed
to lurk within these appearances or behind them.

All modern idealists have perceived that an actual
appearance cannot be a part of a substance that does
not appear ; the given image has only the given
relations ; if I assign other relations to it (which I do
if I attribute existence to it) I substitute for the pure
datum one of two other things : either a substance
possessing the same form as that datum, but created
and dissolved in its own medium, at its own periods,
apart from all observation ; or else, a perception of
my own, a moment in my experience, carrying the
vision of such an image. The former choice simply
puts me back at the beginning of physics, when a
merely pictorial knowledge of the material world
existed, and nothing of its true mechanism and history
had been discovered. The latter choice posits human
discourse, or as these philosophers call it, experience :
and it is certain that the status of a datum in discourse
or experience is that of a mere appearance, fluctuating,
intermittent, never twice the same, and dependent for
its specious actuality on the movement of attention
and the shuffling of confused images in the fancy.
In other words, what exists — that is, what is carried

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 57

on through the flux and has changing and external
relations — is a life, discourse itself, the voluminous
adventures of the mind in its wholeness. This is also
what novelists and literary psychologists endeavour
to record or to imagine ; and the particular data,
hardly distinguishable by the aid of a word clapped on
to them, are only salient sparks or abstract points of
reference for an observer intent on ulterior events.
It is ulterior events, the whole of human experience
and history as conventionally reported, that is the
object of belief in this school, and the true existence.

Ostensibly empiricists seek to reduce this un
manageable object to particular data, and to attribute
existence to each scintilla taken separately ; but in
reality all the relations of these intuitions (which are
not relations between the data), their temporal order,
subordination to habit and passion, associations, mean
ing, and embosoming intelligence, are interpolated as
if they were matters of course ; and indeed they are,
because these are the tides of animal life on which
the datum sparkles for a moment. Empiricists are
interested in practice, and wish to work with as light
an intellectual equipment as possible ; they therefore
attribute existence to " ideas " —meaning intuitions
but professing to mean data. If they were interested
in these data for their own sake, they would perceive
that they are only symbols, like words, used to mark
or express the crises in their practical career ; and
becoming fervid materialists again in their beliefs, as
they have always been in their allegiances, they might
soon go so far as to deny that there is intuition of data
at all : which is a radical way of denying their existence.
Discourse and experience would thus drop out of sight
altogether, and instead of data of intuition there would
be only the pictorial elements of physics — the other
possible form in which anything given may be asserted
to exist.

58 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

If anything, therefore, exists at all when an appear
ance arises, this existence is not the unit that appears,
but either a material fact presenting such an appear
ance, though constituted by many other relations, or
else an actual intuition evoking, creating, or dreaming
that non-existent unit. Idealists, if they are thorough,
will deny both ; for neither a material thing nor an
actual intuition has its being in being perceived : both,
by definition, exist on their own account, by virtue of
their internal energy and natural relations. There
fore either existence apart from givenness is admitted,
inconsistently with idealism, or existence is denied
altogether. It is allowed, and in fact urged, by all
complete idealists that appearance, far from involving
the existence of what appears, positively excludes it.
Esse est percipi was a maxim recalled by an intelligible
literary impulse, as Faust said, Gefiihl ist Alles ! Yet
that maxim was uttered without reflection, because
what those who uttered it really meant was the exact
opposite, namely, that only spirits, or perhaps one
spirit, existed, which were beings perfectly imper
ceptible. It was the beautiful and profound part of
such a sentiment that whatever is pictorial is non
existent. Data could be only forms assumed by
animal sensibility, like the camel and the weasel seen
by Hamlet in a cloud ; as these curious creatures
could have no zoological existence in that nebula, so
the units of human apperception have no existence
anywhere.

When idealists say, therefore, that ideas are the
only objects of human knowledge and that they exist
only in the mind, their language is incoherent, because
knowledge of ideas is not knowledge, and presence
to intuition is not existence. But this incoherence
enables two different philosophies to use the same
formula, to the extreme confusion both of doctrine
and feeling. One philosophy under the name idea

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 59

conceives of a fact or phenomenon, a phase in the
flux of fortune or experience, existing at a given
moment, and known at other moments to have existed
there : in other words, its ideas are recollected events
in nature, the subject-matter of psychology and
physics. This philosophy, when carried out, becomes
materialism ; its psychology turns into a record of
behaviour and its phenomenalistic view of nature into
a mathematical calculus of invisible processes. The
other philosophy (which alone concerns me here)
under the name idea understands the terms of sen
sation and thought, and their pictorial or rhetorical
synthesis. Since these themes of intuition are called
upon to absorb all reality, and no belief is accepted
as more than a fresh datum in thought, this philo
sophy denies the transcendence of knowledge and the
existence of anything.

^Although the temper nf absolute idealists is often
£Dj^frnm^rrptirnT7 thoir rjggjj^ffig scepticism itself?"
as appears not only in their criticism of all dogma, buT
in the reasons they give for their own views. What
are these reasons ? That the criticism of knowledge
proves that actual thinking is the only reality ; that
the objects of knowledge can live, move, and have
their being only within it ; that existence is something
merely imputed ; and that truth is coherence among
views having themselves no objects. A fact, these
critics say, is a concept. This statement might seem
absurd, since a concept means at most the idea or
supposition of a fact ; but if the statement is taken
sympathetically, for what the malicious criticism of
knowledge means by it, it amounts to this : that there
are no facts, but that what we call facts, and believe
to be such, are really only conventional fictions, imagina
tions of what facts would be if facts were possible at
all. That facts are ideals, impossible to realise, is
clear on transcendental principles, since a fact would

60 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

be an event or existence which knowledge would have
to approach and lay siege to somehow from the out
side, so that for knowledge (the only reality on this
system) they would always remain phantoms, creatures
of a superstitious instinct, terms for ever posited but
never possessed, and therefore perpetually unreal. If
fact or truth had any separate being it could not be
an integral part of knowledge ; what modicum of
reality facts or truths can possess they must borrow
from knowledge, in which they perforce remain ideals
only ; so that it is only as unreal that they are real at
all. Transcendentalists are sure that knowledge is
everything, not because they presume that everything
is known, but precisely because they see that there is
nothing to know. If anything existed actually, or if
there was any independent truth, it would be un
knowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive know
ledge. The glorious thing about knowledge, in their
eyes, is that, as there is nothing to know, knowledge
is a free and a sure creation, new and self-grounded
for ever.

Transcendentalism, when it is thorough, accordingly
agrees with the Indian systems in maintaining that
the illusion that given objects exist has itself no
existence. Any actual sensation, any instance of
thinking, would be a self-existing fact ; but facts are
only concepts, that is, inert terms in absolute thought :
if illusions occurred actually, they would not be con
cepts but events, and though their visionary objects
might be non-existent, the vision of them would exist ;
and they would be the sort of independent facts which
transcendental logic excludes as impossible. Acts of
judging or positing or imagining cannot be admitted
on this system until they in their turn have been
posited in another judgement ; that is, until they
cease to hide their heads in the obscurity of self-
existence, and become purely ideal themes of actual

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 61

intuition. When they have thus become pheno
menal, intent and judgement may posit them and
depute them to exist ; but the belief that they exist
otherwise than as present postulates is always false.
Imputed existence is the only existence possible, but
must always be imputed falsely. For example, the
much-talked-of opinions of ancient philosophers, if
they had existed at all, would have had to exist before
they became objects of intuition to the historian, or
to the reader of history, who judges them to have
existed ; but such self-existence is repugnant to tran
scendental logic : it is a ghost cut off from knowledge
and from the breath of life in me here and now.
Therefore the opinions of philosophers exist only in
history, history exists only in the historian, and the
historian only in the reader ; and the reader himself
exists only for his self -consciousness, which is not
really his own, but absolute consciousness thinking
about him or about all things from his point of view.
Thus everything exists only ideally, by being falsely
supposed to exist. The only knowable reality is
unreal because specious, and all other reality is un
real because unknowable.

Transcendentalists are thus driven, like Parmenides
and the Vedanta philosophy, to withdraw into a dark
interior yet omnipresent principle, the unfathomable
force that sets all this illusion going, and at the same
time rebukes and annuls the illusion. I am here
concerned, let me repeat, with scepticism, not with
compensatory dogmas ; but for the transcendentalist,
who fundamentally abhors substance, the compen
satory dogma itself is one more denial of existence.
For what, in his system, is this transcendental seat of
all illusion, this agent in all judgements and positings ?
Not an existing spirit, if such a phrase could have a
meaning. Absolute thought cannot exist first, before
it imputes existence to other things or to itself. If it

62 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

needed to possess existence before imputing it, as the
inexpert in logic might suppose, the whole principle
of transcendental criticism would be abandoned and
disproved, and nothing would any longer prevent the
existence of intuitions or of material things before
any one posited them. But if non-existent, what can
absolute spirit be ? Just a principle, a logic to be
embodied, a self-creating programme or duty, assert
ing itself without any previous instrument, ground, or
occasion. Existence is something utterly unworthy
of such a transcendental spirit, and repugnant to it.
Spirit is here only a name for absolute law, for the
fatality or chance that one set of appearances instead
of another insists upon arising. No doubt this
fatality is welcome to the enthusiast in whom this
spirit is awake, and its very groundlessness takes on
the form of freedom and creative power to his appre
hension : but this sympathy with life, being expressly
without any natural basis, is itself a happy accident,
and precarious : and sometimes conscience may
suddenly turn against it, and call it vain, mad, and
criminal. Fichte once said that he who truly wills
anything must will that very thing for ever ; and
this saying may be interpreted consistently with tran
scendentalism, if it is understood to mean that, since
transcendental will is dateless and creates its own
universe wherever it exerts itself, the character of this
will is unalterable in that phase of it, producing just
that vision and that world, which being out of time
cannot be devoured by time. But perhaps even
Fichte was not free from human weakness, and he
may also have meant, or half-meant, that a thorough
education, such as Prussia was called to create, could
fix the will of mankind and turn it into an unalterable
habit ; and that a philosopher could pledge the absolute
always to posit the same set of objects. So understood,
the maxim would be contrary to transcendentalism

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 63

and to the fervent conviction of Fichte himself, which
demanded "new worlds for ever." Even if he meant
only that the principle of perpetual novelty at least
was safe and could never be betrayed by the event,
he would have contradicted the absolute freedom of
" Life " to be what it willed, and his own occasional
fears that, somewhere and some day, Life might grow
weary, and might consent to be hypnotised and en
slaved by the vision of matter which it had created.

But the frailty even of the greatest idealists is
nothing against idealism, and the principle that
existence is something always imputed, and never
found, is not less cogent if idealists, for the sake of
courtesy, sometimes say that when existence is im
puted necessarily it is imputed truly ; and it makes
no difference for my object whether they call fiction
truth because it is legal, or call legality illusion because
it is false. In any case, I can invoke the authority of
this whole school, in which consciousness has been
studied and described with admirable sincerity, for
the thesis I have at heart. They deny with one voice
that anything given can exist on its own account, or
can be anything but a theme chosen by the spirit, a
theme which no substantial thing or event existing
outside could ever force the spirit to conceive or to
copy. Nothing existent can appear, and nothing
specious can exist. An apparition is a thought, its
whole life is but mine in thinking it ; and whatever
monition or significance I may attribute to its presence,
it can never be anything but the specious thing it is.
In the routine of animal life, an appearance may be
normal or abnormal, and animal faith or practical
intellect may interpret it in a way practically right or
wrong ; but in itself every appearance, just because
it is an appearance, is an illusion.

Confirmation of this thesis may also be found in
an entirely different quarter, in natural history. The

64 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

sensibility of animals, as judged by their motions and
behaviour, is due to their own structure. The sur
rounding facts and forces are like the sun shining and
the rain falling on the just and the unjust ; they con
dition the existence of the animal and reward any apt
habits which he may acquire ; but he survives mainly
by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity
to most of the vibrations that run through him. It is
only in very special directions, to very special occasional
stimulations, that he develops instinctive responses in
special organs : and his intuitions, if he has them,
express these reactions. If the stimulus is cut off,
the material sources of it may continue to be what
they were, but they will not be perceived. If the
stimulus, or anything equivalent to it, reaches the
brain from any source, as in dreams, the same intuition
will appear, in the absence of the material object.
The feelings of animals express their bodily habit ;
they do not express directly either the existence or
the character of any external thing. The intent to
react on these external things is independent of any
presumptive data of intuition and antecedent to their
appearance : it is an animal endeavour in pursuit or
avoidance, or an animal expectation ; but the signals
by which intuition may mark the crises of this animal
watch or animal struggle are the. same signals as
appear in a dream, when nothing is afoot. The
immediate visionary datum is never the intended
object, but always a pathological symptom, a term in
discourse, a description proffered at that moment by
that feeling for that object, different for each channel
of sense, translating digestibility into taste, salubrity
into freshness, distance into size, refraction into colour,
attitude into outline, distribution into perspective, and
immersing everything in a moral medium, where it
becomes a good or an evil, as it cannot be save to
animal sympathy.

AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION 65

All these transcripts, however original in character,
remain symbols in function, because they arise in the
act of focussing animal sensibility or animal endeavour
upon some external influence. In a healthy life they
become the familiar and unmistakable masks of
nature, lending to everything in the environment its
appropriate aspect in human discourse, its nick
name in the human family. For this reason, when
imagination works in a void (as it can do in dreams or
under the influence of violent passion) it becomes
illusion in the bad sense of this word ; that is, it is
still taken for a symbol, when it is the symbol of
nothing. All these data, if by a suspension of practical
reference they came to be regarded in themselves,
would cease to be illusions cognitively, since no
existence would be suggested by any of them ; but
a practical man might still call them illusions for that
very reason, because although free from error they
would be devoid of truth. In order to reach existences
intent must transcend intuition, and take data for
what they mean, not for what they are ; it must credit
them, as understanding credits words, accepting the
passing vision as a warrant for something that once
was, or that will be, or that lies in an entirely different
medium, that of material being, or of discourse else
where. Intuition cannot reveal or discriminate any
fact ; it is pure fancy ; and the more I sink into it,
and the more absolute I make it, the more fanciful it
becomes. If ever it ceases to mean anything at all, it
becomes pure poetry if placid, and mere delirium if
intense. So a pain, when it is not sorrow at some
event or the sign of some injury or crisis in bodily
life, becomes sheer horror, and a sort of wanton little
hell, existing absolutely ; because the rending of the
organism has raised intuition to an extreme intensity
without giving it direction upon anything to be found
or done in the world, or contemplated in the fancy ;

F

66 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

and pain, when it reaches distraction, may be said to
be that moral monster, intuition devouring itself, or
wasted in agony upon nothing.

Thus scientific psychology confirms the criticism
of knowledge and the experience of life which proclaim
that the immediate objects of intuition are mere
appearances and that nothing given exists as it is
given.

CHAPTER IX

THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE

THE loss of faith, as I have already observed, has no
tendency to banish ideas ; on the contrary, since
doubt arises on reflection, it tends to keep the imagina
tion on the stretch, and lends to the whole spectacle
of things a certain immediacy, suavity, and humour.
All that is sordid or tragic falls away, and everything
acquires a lyric purity, as if the die had not yet been
cast and the ominous choice of creation had not been
made. Often the richest philosophies are the most
sceptical ; the mind is not then tethered in its home
paddock, but ranges at will over the wilderness of
being. The Indians, who deny the existence of the
world, have a keen sense for its infinity and its varie
gated colours ; they play with the monstrous and
miraculous in the grand manner, as in the Arabian
Nights. No critic has had a sharper eye for the out
lines of ideas than Hume, who found it impossible
seriously to believe that they revealed anything. In
the critic, as in the painter, suspension of belief and
of practical understanding is favourable to vision ;
the arrested eye renders every image limpid and un
equivocal. And this is not merely an effect of physio
logical compensation, in that perhaps the nervous
energy withdrawn from preparations for action is
allowed to intensify the process of mere sensation.
There ensues a logical clarification as well ; because

67

68 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

so long as belief, interpretation, and significance
entered in, the object in hand was ambiguous ; in
seeking the fact the mind overlooked or confused the
datum. Yet each element in this eager investigation
—including its very eagerness — is precisely what it is ;
and if I renounce for the moment all transitive in
telligence, and give to each of these elements its due
definition, I shall have a much richer as well as clearer
collection of terms and relations before me, than when
I was clumsily attempting to make up my mind.
Living beings dwell in their expectations rather than
in their senses. If they are ever to see what they see,
they must first in a manner stop living ; they must
suspend the will, as Schopenhauer put it ; they must
photograph the idea that is flying past, veiled in its
very swiftness. This swiftness is not its own fault,
but that of my haste and inattention ; my hold is
loose on it, as in a dream ; or else perhaps those veils
and that swiftness are the truth of the picture ; and
it is they that the true artist should be concerned to
catch and to eternalise, restoring to all that the practical
intellect calls vague its own specious definition.
Nothing is vague in itself, or other than just what it
is. Symbols are vague only in respect to their signifi
cation, when this remains ambiguous.

It is accordingly an inapt criticism often passed
upon Berkeley and Hume that they overlooked vague
ness in ideas, although almost every human idea is
scandalously vague. No, their intuition of ideas, at
least initially, was quite direct and honest. The
ambiguity they overlooked lay in the relation of ideas
to physical things, which they wished to reduce to
groups or series of these pellucid ideas — a chimerical
physics. Had they abstained altogether from identify
ing ideas with objects of natural knowledge (which are
events and facts), and from trying to construct material
things out of optical and tactile images, they might

THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE 69

have much enriched the philosophy of specious reality,
and discerned the innocent realm of ideas as directly
as Plato did, but more accurately. In this they need
not have confused or undermined faith in natural
things. Perception is faith ; more perception may
extend this faith or reform It, but can never recant it
except by sophistry. These virgin philosophers were
like the cubists or futurists in the painting of to-day.
They might have brought to light curious and neglected
forms of direct intuition. They could not justly have
been charged with absurdity for seeing what they
actually saw. But they lapse into absurdity, and that
irremediably, if they pretend to be the first and only
masters of anatomy and topography.

Far from being vague or abstract the obvious ideas
remaining to a complete sceptic may prove too absorb
ing, too multitudinous, or too sweet. A moral repro
bation of them is no less intelligible than is the scientific
criticism which rejects them as illusions and as no
constituents of the existing world. Conscience no
less than business may blame the sceptic for a sort
of luxurious idleness ; he may call himself a lotus-
eater, may heave a sigh of fatigue at doing nothing,
and may even feel a touch of the vertigo and wish to
close the eyes on all these images that entertain him
to no purpose. But scepticism is an exercise, not a
life ; it is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice
and render it all the more apt, when the time comes,
to believe and to act wisely ; and meantime the pure
sceptic need take no offence at the multiplicity of
images that crowd upon him, if he is scrupulous not
to trust them and to assert nothing at their prompting.
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is
shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer :
there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly
through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of
instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for

yo SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

fidelity and happiness. But the philosopher, when he
is speculative only, is a sort of perpetual celibate ; he
is bent on not being betrayed, rather than on being
annexed or inspired ; and although if he is at all wise
he must see that the true marriage of the mind is with
nature and science and the practical arts, yet in his
special theoretic vocation, it will be a boon to him to
view all experience simply, in the precision and distinct
ness which all its parts acquire when not referred to any
substance which they might present confusedly, nor to
any hypothesis or action which they might suggest.

The sceptic, then, as a consequence of carrying his
scepticism to the greatest lengths, finds himself in the
presence of more luminous and less equivocal objects
than does the working and believing mind ; only these
objects are without meaning, they are only what they
are obviously, all surface. They show him every
thing thinkable with the greatest clearness and force ;
but he can no longer imagine that he sees in these
objects anything save their instant presence and their
face- value. Scepticism therefore suspends all know
ledge worthy of the name, all that transitive and pre
sumptive knowledge of facts which is a form of belief ;
and instead it bestows intuition of ideas, contemplative,
aesthetic, dialectical, arbitrary. But whereas transitive
knowledge, though important if true, may always be
challenged, intuition, on the contrary, which neither
has nor professes to have any ulterior object or truth,
runs no risks of error, because it claims no jurisdiction
over anything alien or eventual.

In this lucidity and calmness of intuition there is
something preternatural. Imagine a child accustomed
to see clothes only on living persons and hardly dis
tinguishing them from the magical strong bodies that
agitate them, and suddenly carry this child into a
costumer's shop, where he will see all sorts of garments
hung in rows upon manikins, with hollow breasts all

THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE 71

of visible wire, and little wooden nobs instead of heads :
he might be seriously shocked or even frightened.
How should it be possible for clothes standing up like
this not to be people ? Such abstractions, he might
say to himself, are metaphysically impossible. Either
these figures must be secretly alive and ready, when he
least expects it, to begin to dance, or else they are not
real at all, and he can only fancy that he sees them.
Just as the spectacle of all these gaunt clothes without
bodies might make the child cry, so later might the
whole spectacle of nature, if ever he became a sceptic.
The little word is has its tragedies ; it marries and
identifies different things with the greatest innocence ;
and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the
charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein
too lies the danger. Whenever I use the word is,
except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it ; and
when I discover my error, the world seems to fall
asunder and the members of my family no longer
know one another. Existence is the strong body and
familiar motion which the young mind expects to find
in every dummy. The oldest of us are sometimes no
less recalcitrant to the spectacle of the garments of
existence — which is all we ever saw of it — when the
existence is taken away. Yet it is to these actual and
familiar, but now disembowelled objects, that scepti
cism introduces us, as if to a strange world ; a vast
costumer's gallery of ideas where all sorts of patterns
and models are on exhibition, without bodies to wear
them, and where no human habits of motion distract
the eye from the curious cut and precise embroideries of
every article. This display, so complete in its spec
tacular reality, not a button nor a feather wanting or
unobserved, is not the living crowd that it ought to
be, but a mockery of it, like the palace of the Sleeping
Beauty. To my conventional mind, clothes without
bodies are no less improper than bodies without

72 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

clothes ; yet the conjunction of these things is but
human. All nature runs about naked, and quite
happy ; and I am not so remote from nature as not to
revert on occasion to that nakedness — which is un
consciousness — with profound relief. But ideas with
out things and apparel without wearers seem to me a
stranger condition ; I think the garments were made
to fit the limbs, and should collapse without them.
Yet, like the fig leaves of Eden, they are not garments
essentially. They become such by accident, when one
or another of them is appropriatea by the providential
buyer — not necessarily human — whose instinct may
choose it ; or else it is perfectly content to miss its
chance, and to lie stacked for ever among its motley
neighbours in this great store of neglected finery.

It was the fear of illusion that originally disquieted
the honest mind, congenitally dogmatic, and drove it
in the direction of scepticism ; and it may find three
ways, not equally satisfying to its honesty, in which
that fear of illusion may be dispelled. One is death,
in which illusion vanishes and is forgotten ; but
although anxiety about error, and even positive error,
are thus destroyed, no solution is offered to the previous
doubt : no explanation of what could have called forth
that illusion or what could have dissipated it. Another
way out is by correcting the error, and substituting a
new belief for it : but while in animal life this is the
satisfying solution, and the old habit of dogmatism
may be resumed in consequence without practical
inconvenience, speculatively the case is not at all
advanced ; because no criterion of truth is afforded
except custom, comfort, and the accidental absence of
doubt ; and what i&- absent by chance may return at
any time unbidden \_ The third way, at which I have
now arrived, is to entertain the illusion without suc
cumbing to it, accepting it openly as an illusion, and
forbidding it to claim any sort of being but that which

THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE 73

it obviously has ; and then, whether it profits me or
not, it will not deceive me. What will remain of this
non-deceptive illusion will then be a truth, and a
truth the being of which requires no explanation, since
it is utterly impossible that it should have been other
wise. Of course I may still ask why the identity of
this particular thing with itself should have occurred
to me ; a question which could only be answered by
plunging into a realm of existence and natural history
every part and principle of which would be just as
contingent, just as uncalled-for, and just as inexplic
able as this accident of my being ; but that this
particular thing, or any other which might have
occurred to me instead, should be constituted as it is
raises no problem ; for how could it have been con
stituted otherwise ? Nor is there any moral offence
any longer in the contingency of my view of it, since
my view of it involves no error. The error came
from a wild belief about it ; and the possibility of
error came from a wild propensity to belief. Relieve
now the pressure of that animal haste and that hungry
presumption ; the error is washed out of the illusion ;
it is no illusion now, but an idea. Just as food would
cease to be food, and poison poison, if you removed
the stomach and the blood that they might nourish
or infect ; and just as beautiful things would cease to
be beautiful if you removed the wonder and the
welcome of living souls, so if you eliminate your
anxiety, deceit itself becomes entertainment, and
every illusion but so much added acquaintance with
the realm of form. For the unintelligible accident of
existence will cease to appear to lurk in this manifest
being, weighting and crowding it, and threatening it
with being swallowed up by nondescript neighbours.
It will appear dwelling in its own world, and shining
by its own light, however brief may be my glimpse of
it : for no date will be written on it, no frame of full

74 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

or of empty time will shut it in ; nothing in it will
be addressed to me, nor suggestive of any spectator.
It will seem an event in no world, an incident in no
experience. The quality of it will have ceased to
exist : it will be merely the quality which it inherently,
logically, and inalienably is. It will be an ESSENCE.

Retrenchment has its rewards. When by a difficult
suspension of judgement I have deprived a given image
of all adventitious significance, when it is taken neither
for the manifestation of a substance nor for an idea in
a mind nor for an event in a world, but simply if a
colour for that colour and if music for that music, and
if a face for that face, then an immense cognitive
certitude comes to compensate me for so much cognitive
abstention. My scepticism at last has touched bottom,
and my doubt has found honourable rest in the
absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence I find and
note, that essence and no other is established before
me. I cannot be mistaken about it, since I now have
no object of intent other than the object of intuition.
If for some private reason I am dissatisfied, and wish
to change my entertainment, nothing prevents ; but
the change leaves the thing I first saw possessed of all
its quality, for the sake of which I perhaps disliked or
disowned it. That, while one essence is before me,
some one else may be talking of another, which he calls
by the same name, is nothing to the purpose ; and if
I myself change and correct myself, choosing a new
essence in place of the old, my life indeed may have
shifted its visions and its interests, but the characters
they had when I harboured them are theirs without
change . Indeed , only because each essence is the essence
defined by instant apprehension can I truly be said to
have changed my mind ; for I can have discarded any
one of them only by substituting something different.
This new essence could not be different from the
former one, if each was not unchangeably itself.

THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE 75

There is, then, a sort of play with the non-existent,
or game of thought, which intervenes in all alleged
knowledge of matters of fact, and survives that know
ledge, if this is ever questioned or disproved. To this
mirage of the non-existent, or intuition of essence, the
pure sceptic is confined ; and confined is hardly the
word ; because though without faith and risk he can
never leave that thin and bodiless plane of being, this
plane in its tenuity is infinite ; and there is nothing
possible elsewhere that, as a shadow and a pattern, is
not prefigured there. To consider an essence is, from
a spiritual point of view, to enlarge acquaintance with
true being ; but it is not even to broach knowledge of
fact ; and the ideal object so defined may have no
natural significance, though it has aesthetic immediacy
and logical definition. The modest scope of this
speculative acquaintance with essence renders it in
fallible, whilst the logical and aesthetic ideality of its
object renders that object eternal. Thus the most
radical sceptic may be consoled, without being rebuked
nor refuted ; he may leap at one bound over the whole
human tangle of beliefs and dogmatic claims, elude
human incapacity and bias, and take hold of the quite
sufficient assurance that any essence or ideal quality
of being which he may be intuiting has just the char
acters he is finding in it, and has them eternally.

This is no idle assurance. After all, the only thing
that can ultimately interest me in other men's experi
ence or, apart from animal egotism, in my own, is just
this character of the essences which at any time have
swum into our ken ; not at all the length of time
through which we may have beheld them, nor the
circumstances that produced that vision ; unless these
circumstances in turn, when considered, place before
the mind the essences which it delights to entertain.
Of course, the choice and the interest of essences come
entirely from the bent of the animal that elicits the

76 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

vision of them from his own soul and its adventures ;
and nothing but affinity with my animal life lends the
essences I am able to discern their moral colour, so
that to my mind they are beautiful, horrible, trivial, or
vulgar. The good essences are such as accompany
and express a good life. In them, whether good or
bad, that life has its eternity. Certainly when I cease
to exist and to think, I shall lose hold on this assurance ;
but the theme in which for a moment I found the
fulfilment of my expressive impulses will remain, as
it always was, a theme fit for consideration, even if no
one else should consider it, and I should never con
sider it again.

Nor is this all. Not only is the character of each
essence inalienable, and, so long as it is open to
intuition, indubitable, but the realm of essences is
infinite. Since any essence I happen to have hit
upon is independent of me and would possess its
precise character if I had never been born, or had
never been led by the circumstances of my life and
temperament to apprehend that particular essence,
evidently all other essences, which I have not been
led to think of, rejoice in the same sort of impalpable
being — impalpable, yet the only sort of being that the
most rugged experience can ever actually find. Thus
a mind enlightened by scepticism and cured of noisy
dogma, a mind discounting all reports, and free from
all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes or
existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very
sweet and marvellous solitude. The ultimate reaches
of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy
transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as
if through the gorges of death it had passed into a
paradise where all things are crystallised into the
image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and
their venom.

CHAPTER X

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY

THERE is some danger in pointing out the obvious.
Quick wits, perceiving at once how obvious the obvious
is (though they may never have noticed it before), will
say it is futile and silly to dwell upon it. Pugnacious
people will assume that you mean more than you say,
and are attempting to smuggle in some objectionable
dogma under your truisms. Finally, docile minds,
pleased to think you are delivering an oracle for their
edification, will bow before your plain words as before
some sacred mystery. The discernment of essence is
subject, I know, to all these misunderstandings, and
before going further I will endeavour to remove them.
In the first place, a warning to tender idealists.
This recognition that the data of experience are
essences is Platonic, but it is a corrective to all that is
sentimental in Platonism, curing it as it were homceo-
pathically. The realm of essence is not peopled
by choice forms or magic powers. It is simply the
unwritten catalogue, prosaic and infinite, of all the
characters possessed by such things as happen to exist,
together with the characters which all different things
would possess if they existed. It is the sum of mention-
able objects, of terms about which, or in which, some
thing might be said. Thus although essences have
the texture and ontological status of Platonic ideas,
they can lay claim to none of the cosmological, meta-

77

78 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

physical, or moral prerogatives attributed to those
ideas. They are infinite in number and neutral in
value. Greek minds had rhetorical habits ; what told
in debate seemed to them final ; and Socrates thought
it important to define in disputation the common
natures designated by various words. Plato, who was
initially a poet, had a warmer intuition of his ideas ;
but it was still grammar and moral prejudice that led
him to select and to deify them. The quality or
function that makes all shepherds shepherds or all
goods good is an essence ; but so are all the remaining
qualities which make each shepherd and each good
distinguishable from every other. Far from gathering
up the fluidity of existence into a few norms for
human language and thought to be focussed upon,
the realm of essence infinitely multiplies that multi
plicity, and adds every undiscriminated shade and
mode of beinsr to those which man has discriminated

O

or which nature contains. Essence is not something
invented or instituted for a purpose ; it is something
passive, anything that might be found, every quality
of being ; it therefore has not the function of reducing
plurality to unity for the convenience of our poor
wits or economy of language. It is far more garrulous
than nature, herself not laconic.

Nor have essences a metaphysical status, so as to
exercise a non-natural control over nature. My
doctrine lends no countenance to the human pre
sumption that whatsoever man notices or names or
loves ought to be more deeply seated in reality or more
permanent than what he ignores or despises. The
good is a great magnet over discourse and imagination,
and therefore rightly rules the Platonic world, which
is that of moral philosophy only ; but this good is
itself defined and chosen by the humble animal nature
of man, demanding to eat and live and love. In the
realm of essence this human good has no pre-eminence,

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 79

and being an essence it has no power. The Platonic
notion that ideas were models which things imper
fectly imitated expresses admirably the moral nature
of man attaining to self-knowledge and proclaiming
clearly his instinctive demands ; or possibly (if the
moralist is also a poet plastic to the wider influences
of nature) defining also the demands which non-
human creatures would make on themselves or on us
if they had life and thought. Platonic ideas, in their
widest range, express sympathy with universal life ;
they are anagrams of moral insight. Hence their
nobility, and constant appeal to minds struggling after
perfection, whether in art or in self-discipline. The
spirit, by expressing itself in them, is fortified, as the
artist is by his work taking shape before his eyes and
revealing to him his own hidden intentions and judge
ments never expressed. But the realm of essence is
no more limited to these few ideals chosen and pro
jected heavenwards by the aspiration of living creatures,
than the celestial galaxy is limited to the north star.
Excellence is relative to the accidental life of nature
which selects now one essence and now another to be
the goal of some thought or endeavour. In the realm
of essence no emphasis falls on these favourite forms
which does not fall equally on every other member
of that infinite continuum. Every bad thing — bad
because false to the ideal which its own nature may
propose to it — illustrates an essence quite as accurately
as if it had been good. No essence, except temporarily
and by accident, is the goal of any natural process,
much less its motive power.

Thus the discernment of essence, while confirming
Platonic logic in the ideal status which it assigns to
the terms of discourse (and discourse includes all that
is mental in sensation and perception), destroys the
illusions of Platonism, because it shows that essences,
being non-existent and omnimodal, can exercise no

8o SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

domination over matter, but themselves come to light
in nature or in thought only as material exigencies may
call them forth and select them. The realm of essence
is a perfect democracy, where everything that is or
might be has a right of citizenship ; so that only some
arbitrary existential principle — call it the predis
positions in matter or the blindness of absolute will-
can be rendered responsible, in a verbal metaphysics,
for things being as they are, causing them to fall now
into this form and now into that, or to choose one
essence rather than another to be their type and ideal.
These chosen types are surrounded in the realm of
essence by every monster, every unexampled being,
and every vice ; no more vicious there, no more
anomalous or monstrous than any other nature. Seen
against that infinite background even the star-dust
of modern astronomy, with its strange rhythms and
laws, and its strange fertility, seems the most curious
of accidents : what a choice for existence to make,
when it might have been anything else ! And as to
the snug universe which the ancients, and most men
in their daily thoughts, have imagined about them,
presided over by its Olympian deities, or its Jewish
God, or its German Will, it is not only the figment of
the most laughable egotism, but even if by chance it
were the actual world, it would be utterly contingent
and ephemeral.

This is one hygienic effect of the discovery of
essence : it is a shower-bath for the dreamy moralist,
and clears Platonism of superstition.

On the other hand, the discernment of essence
reinstates the Socratic analysis of knowledge, by
showing that essences are indispensable terms in the
perception of matters of fact, and render transitive
knowledge possible. If there were no purely ideal
characters present to intuition yet not existentially a
part either of the mind or of the environment, nothing

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 81

ulterior could ever be imagined, much less truly
conceived. Every supposed instance of knowledge
would be either a bit of sentience without an object,
or an existing entity unrelated to any mind. But an
essence given in intuition, being non-existent in itself
and by no means the object at that moment intended by
the animal in his alertness or pursuit, may become a
description of that object. If there is to be intelligence
at all, the immediate must be vehicular. It is so
when animal fancy is turned to the description of
things ; for then passive sensibility supplies terms
which are in themselves volatile and homeless, and
these terms may be dispersed as names, to christen
the things that receive them, carrying intelligence by
its intent to its objects (objects already selected by
animal endeavour) and reporting the objects to the
animal mind by their appearance. What is given
becomes in this manner a sign for what is sought,
and a conventional description of it ; and the object
originally posited by faith and intent in the act of
living may be ultimately more and more accurately
revealed to belief and to thought. Essences are ideal
terms at the command of fancy and of the senses
(whose data are fancies) as words are at the command
of a ready tongue. If thought arises at all, it must
think something after some fashion ; and the essences
it evokes in intuition enable it to imagine, to assert,
and perhaps truly to know something about what is
not itself nor its own condition : some existing thing
or removed event which would otherwise run on
blindly in its own medium, at best overtaking the
animal unawares, or confronting him to no purpose.
But when the animate body responds to circumstances
and is sensitive, in various unprecedented ways, to
their variations, it acquires a whole sensuous vocabulary
in which to describe them, colours, sounds, shapes,
sizes, excellences, and defects being the parts of

G

82 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

speech in its grammar. It feels hot or cold according
to the season ; so that cold and heat become signs of
the seasons for the spirit, the homely poetry in which
the senses render the large facts and the chief influences
of nature. Perhaps even the vegetative soul has her
dreams, but in the animal these floating visions are
clarified by watchfulness and can be compared and
contrasted in their character as well as in their occasions;
and they lend intelligence terms in which to think and
judge. The toys of sense become the currency of com
merce ; ideas, which were only echoes of facts, serve
as symbols for them. Thus intuition of essences first
enables the mind to say something about anything,
to think of what is not given, and to be a mind at all.

A great use of the discovery of essence, then, is to
justify the notions of intelligence and knowledge, other
wise self-contradictory, and to show how such trans
cendence of the actual is possible for the animal mind.

The notion of essence is also useful in dismissing
and handing over to physical science, where it belongs,
the mooted question concerning the primary and
secondary qualities of matter. There is a profound
but genuine problem here which no logical discrimina
tion and no psychological analysis can affect, namely :
What are the elements of matter, and by what arrange
ment or motion of these elements do gross bodies
acquire their various properties ? The physical philo
sophers must tell us, if they can, how matter is com
posed : and as they are compelled, like the rest of us,
to begin by studying the aspects and behaviour of
obvious bodies, on the scale of human perception, it
is but fair to give them time, or even eternity, in
which to come to a conclusion. But the question of
primary and secondary qualities, as mooted in modern
philosophy, is a false problem. It rests on the pre
sumption that the data of sense can be and should
be constituents of the object in nature, or at least

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 83

exactly like its constituents. The object in nature is,
for example, bread I am eating : and the presumption
of modern psychologists is that this object is, or
ought to be, composed of my sensations of contact,
colour, temperature, movement, and pleasure in eating
it. The pleasure and the colour, however, soon prove
to be reversible according to the accidents of appetite
or jaundice in me, without any change in the object
itself. In the act of eating (overlooked by these
psychologists) I have my radical assurance of that
object, know its place, and continue to testify to its
identity. The bread, for animal faith, is this thing
I am eating, and causing to disappear to my substantial
advantage ; and although language is clumsy in
expressing this assurance, which runs much deeper
than language, I may paraphrase it by saying that
bread is this substance I can eat and turn into my
own substance ; in seizing and biting it I determine
its identity and its place in nature, and in transforming
it I prove its existence. If the psychological critics
of experience overlooked this animal faith in fact as
they do in theory, their theory itself would have no
point of application, and they would not know what
they were talking about, and would not really be
talking about anything. Their data would have no
places and no context. As it is, they continue
illegitimately to posit the bread, as an animal would,
and then, in their human wisdom, proceed to remove
from the description of it the colour and the pleasure
concerned, as being mere effects on themselves, while
they identify the bread itself with the remainder of
their description hypostatised : shape, weight, and
hardness. But how should some data, when posited,
produce others entirely different, but contemporary,
or perhaps earlier ? Evidently these so-called primary
qualities are simply those essences which custom or
science continues to use in its description of things :

84 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

but meantime the things have evaporated, and the
description of them, in no matter what terms, ought
to be idle and useless. All knowledge of nature and
history has become a game of thought, a laborious
dream in which a dim superstition makes me believe
that some trains of images are more prosperous than
others.

It is because essences are not discerned that philo
sophers in so many ways labour the hopeless notion
that there is nothing in sense which is not first in
things. Either perception and knowledge (which are
animal faith) are deputed to be intuition, so that
things have to be composed pictorially, out of the
elements of human discourse, as if their substance
consisted of images pressed together like a pack of
cards ; or else ideas must be explained as imports
from the outer wrorld, prolonging the qualities of
things, as if the organs of sense were only holes in
the skin, through which emanations of things could
pass ready-made into the heart or head, and perhaps
in those dark caverns could breed unnaturally together,
producing a monstrous brood of dreams and errors.
But, as a matter of fact, elaborate bodily mechanisms
are just as requisite for seeing as for thinking, and
the landscape, as a man sees it, is no less human than
the universe as his philosophy constructs it — and we
know how human that is. Evidences soon accumulate
to prove that no quality in the object is like any datum
of sense. Nothing given exists. Consider, for in
stance, the water which seems cold to one hand and
warm to the other. Shall the water be called hot or
cold ? Both, certainly, if a full description of it, in
all its relations and appearances, is what is sought.
But if what is sought is the substance of the water,
properties shown to be relative to my organs of sense
cannot be " real " qualities of that substance. Their
original (for they were still expected to have originals)

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 85

^k

was accordingly placed elsewhere. Perhaps the " real "
cold might be in the warm hand, and the " real "
warmth in the cold one ; or in cold and hot tracts of
the brain respectively ; or else " in the mind " —a
substance which might endure heat and cold simultane
ously in different parts of itself. Or perhaps the mind
was simply the heat and the cold existing successively,
each a feeling absolute in itself : but in this case a
second mind would be required to observe, remember,
and appropriate those existing feelings, and how
should reflection reach those feelings or know at all
what they were ? If they are past, how should
intuition possess them now ? And if they are only
the present data of intuition, need they ever have
existed before, or in any form but that in which I
feel them now, when I feel them no longer ?

The notion that knowledge is intuition, that it
must either penetrate to the inner quality of its object
or else have no object but the overt datum, has not
been carried out with rigour : if it had, it might have
been sooner abandoned. Rudimentary vital feelings,
such as pleasure or hunger, are not supposed even by
the most mythological philosophers to be drawn from
external sources of the same quality. Plato in one
place says of intelligence that there must surely be
floods of it in the vast heavens, as there are floods
of light there, whence puny man may draw his
dribblet. He neglects, however, to extend this prin
ciple to pain, pleasure, or hunger. He does not argue
that my paltry pains and pleasures can be but drops
sucked in from some vast cosmic reservoir of these
feelings, nor that my momentary hunger could never
have improvised its own quality, but must be only a
bit, transferred to my mortal stomach, of a divine
hunger eternally gnawing the whole sky. Yet this
is the principle on which many a candid idolater has
supposed, and still supposes, that light, space, music,

86 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

and reason, as his intuition renders them, must
permeate the universe.

The illusion is childish, and when we have once
discerned essence, it seems strangely idolatrous. The
essences given in intuition are fetched from no original.
The reason, music, space, and light of my imagination
are essences existing nowhere : the intuition of them
is quite as spiritual and quite as personal as my pain,
pleasure, or hunger, and quite as little likely to be
drawn from an imaginary store of similar substances
in the world at large. They are dream-lights kindled
by my fancy, like all the terms of discourse ; they do
not need to be previously resident either in the object
or in the organ of sense. Not existing at all, they
cannot be the causes of their own appearance ; nor
would introducing an existing triangle under the skin,
or making the brain triangular, in the least help to
display the triangle to intuition. But if some material
thing called a triangle is placed before me at a suitable
distance, my eyes and brain will do the rest, and the
essence dear to Euclid will arise in my mind's eye.
No essence would ever appear simply because many
hypostatic instances of it existed in the world : a
living body must create the intuition and blossom into
it, evoking some spontaneous image. Sense is a
faculty of calling names under provocation ; all
perception and thought are cries and comments
elicited from the heart of some living creature. They
are original, though not novel, like the feelings of
lovers : normal phases of animation in animals, whose
life carries this inner flux of pictures and currents in
the fancy, mixed with little and great emotions and
dull bodily feelings : nothing in all this discourse
being a passive copy of existences elsewhere.

On the other hand, if the so-called primary qualities,
taken pictorially, are just as symbolic as the secondary
ones, the secondary, taken indicatively, are just as true

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 87

as the primary. They too report some particularity
in the object which, being relative to me, may be of
the highest importance, and being also relative to
something in the constitution of the object, may be a
valuable indication of its nature, like greenness in
grapes. The qualities most obviously relative and
reversible, like pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad,
are truly qualities of things in some of their relations.
They can all, by judicious criticism and redistribution,
become true expressions of the life of nature. They
have their exits and their entrances at appointed
times, and they supply a perspective view, or caricature,
of the world no less interesting and pungent for being
purely egotistical. Artists have their place, and the
animal mind is one of them.

That like knows like is a proverb, and after the
manner of proverbs it is applicable on occasion, but
its opposite is so too. Similar minds can understand
the same things, and in that sense can understand
each other : they can share and divine one another's
thoughts. This is because similar organs under
similar stimulation will yield similar intuitions, reveal
ing the same essence : like knows like by dramatic
sympathy and ideal unanimity. But in sensuous
perception the unlike knows the unlike. Here the
organ is not adjusted to a similar organ, like instru
ments tuned up to the same key : the adjustment is
rather to heterogeneous events in the environment or
remote facts on quite a different scale ; and the images
that mediate this knowledge are quite unlike the events
they signify. It would be grotesque to expect a
flower to imitate or to resemble the soil, climate,
moisture, and light, or even the seed and sap, that
preside over its budding : but the flower presupposes
all these agencies and is an index to them ; an index
which may become a sign and a vehicle of knowledge
when it is used as an index by some discursive observer.

88 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Any given essence is normally a true sign for the
object or event which occupies animal attention when
that essence appears : as it is true of arsenic that it is
poisonous and of pepper that it is hot, although the
quality of being hot or poisonous cannot possibly be
a material constituent of those substances, nor a copy
of such a constituent. The environment determines
the occasions on which intuitions arise, the psyche—
the inherited organisation of the animal — determines
their form, and ancient conditions of life on earth no
doubt determined which psyches should arise and
prosper ; and probably many forms of intuition,
unthinkable to man, express the facts and the rhythms
of nature to other animal minds. Yet all these various
symbolisms and sensuous dialects may be truly
significant, composing most relevant complications in
nature, by which she comments on herself. To
suppose that some of these comments are poetical
and others literal is gratuitous. They are all presum
ably poetical in form (intuition being poetry in act)
and all expressive in function, and addressed to the
facts of nature in some human and moral perspective,
as poetry is too.

The absurdity of wishing to have intuitions of
things reaches its climax when we ask whether things,
if nobody looked at them, would still look as they do.
Of course they would still be what they are : but
whether their intrinsic essence, whether they are
looked at or not, resembles such essences as eyes of one
sort or another might gather by looking at them, is an
idle question. It is not resemblance but relevance
and closeness of adaptation that render a language
expressive or an expression true. We read nature as
the English used to read Latin, pronouncing it like
English, but understanding it very well. If all other
traditions of Latin euphony had been lost, there would
have been no means of discovering in what respect

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 89

the English pronunciation was a distortion, although
the judicious would have suspected that the Romans
could not have had an Oxonian accent. So each
tribe of animals, each sense, each stage of experience
and science, reads the book of nature according to a
phonetic system of its own, with no possibility of
exchanging it for the native sounds : but this situation,
though hopeless in one sense, is not unsatisfactory
practically, and is innocently humorous. It adds to
the variety, if not to the gaiety, of experience ; and
perhaps a homely accent in knowledge, as in Latin,
renders learning more savoury and familiar, and makes
us more willing to read.

It is just because the images given in sense are so
very original and fantastic that understanding can
enlarge knowledge by correcting, combining, and
discounting those appearances. Sensible qualities,
like pet names, do very well at home, when no con
sistent or exact description of things is required, but
only some familiar signal. When it comes to public
business, however, more serious and legal designations
have to be used, and these are what we call science.
The description is not less symbolic but more accurate
and minute. It may also involve — as in optics and
psychology — a discovery of the images of sense as
distinct from their original uses as living visions of
things ; and we may then learn that our immediate
experience was but a diving-board, on which we
hardly knew we were standing in plunging into the
world. It was indeed essentially a theoretic eminence,
a place of outlook, intended to fortify and prepare us
for the plunge. Accordingly the symbols of sense are
most relevant to their object at the remove and on the
scale on which our daily action encounters it. In
science, analogies and hypotheses, if not microscopes
and telescopes, supply ideas of things more immediate
or more remote. Thus the warmth and the cold felt

9o SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

at once in the same water inform me more directly
about the water in relation to my two hands, than
about my temperature, my brain, or my intuitions ;
and yet these things too are involved in that event
and may be discovered in it by science. But science
and sense, though differing in their scope, are exactly
alike in their truth ; and the views taken by science,
though more penetrating and extensive, are still views :
ground plans, elevations, and geometric projections
taking the place of snapshots. All intuitions, whether
in sense or thought, are theoretic : all are appropriate
renderings, on some method and on some scale, of
the circumstances in which they arise, and may serve
to describe those circumstances truly : but experience
and tact are requisite, as in the use of any language
or technique of art, in distributing our stock symbols,
and fitting the image to the occasion and the word to
the fact.

The notion of essence also relieves the weary
philosopher of several other problems, even more
scholastic and artificial, concerning sensations and
ideas, particulars and universals, the abstract and the
concrete. There are no such differences in essences
as they are given : all are equally immediate and
equally unsubstantial, equally ideal and equally com
plete. Nothing could be more actual and specific
than some unpleasant inner feeling or sentiment, as
it colours the passing moment ; yet nothing could be
less descriptive of anything further, or vaguer in its
significance, or more ephemeral an index to processes
and events which it does not disclose but which are
all its substance. And the clearest idea — say a geo
metrical sphere — and the most remote from sense
(if we mean by sense the images actually supplied
by the outer organs) is just such a floating presence,
caught and lost again, an essence that in itself tells
me nothing of its validity, nor of a world of fact to

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 91

which it might apply. All these current distinctions
are extraneous to essences, which are the only data
of experience. The distinctions are borrowed from
various ulterior existential relations subsisting between
facts, some mental and some material, but none of
them ever given in intuition. The mental facts,
namely the intuitions to which the essences appear,
may be confused by psychologists with those essences,
as the material things supposed to possess those
essences as qualities may be confused with them by
the practical intellect, and both may be called by the
same names ; a double equivocation which later
enables the metaphysician, by a double hypostasis of
the datum, to say that the material thing and the
mental event are one and the same given fact. We
may innocently speak of given facts, meaning those
posited in previous perceptions or referred to in
previous discourse : but no fact can be a given fact
in the sense of being a datum of intuition. And it is
entirely on relations between facts not given that
those current distinctions rest. They may often
express truly the relative scope of intuitions, or the
manner in which they take place amongst the general
events in nature or arise in the animal body : but in
respect to essences, which are the only terms of actual
thought, they are perfectly unmeaning.

Suppose, for instance, that I see yellow, that my
eyes are open, and that there is a buttercup before
me ; my intuition (not properly the essence " yellow "
which is the datum) is then called a sensation. If
again I see yellow with my eyes closed, the intuition
is called an idea or a dream — although often in what
is called an idea no yellow appears, but only words.
If yet again I see yellow with my eyes open, but there
is no buttercup, the intuition is called a hallucination.
These various situations are curious, and worth dis
tinguishing in optics and in medical psychology, but

92 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

for the sceptical scrutiny of experience they make no
difference. What can inform me, when I see yellow
simply, whether my eyes are open or shut, or whether
I am awake or dreaming, or what functions material
buttercups may have in psycho-physical correlation,
or whether there is anything physical or anything
psychical in the world, or any world at all ? These
notions are merely conventional, imported knowledge
or imported delusion. Such extraneous circumstances,
whether true or false, cannot alter in the least the
essence which I have before me, nor its sort of reality,
nor its status in respect to my intuition of it.

Suppose again that I am at sea and feel the ship
rocking. This feeling is called external perception ;
but if I feel nausea, my feeling is called internal
sensation, or emotion, or introspection ; and there
are sad psychologists to conclude thence that while
the ship rocking is something physical, and a mere
appearance, nausea is something psychical, and an
absolute reality. Why this partiality in distributing
metaphysical dignities amongst things equally obvious ?
Each essence that appears appears just as it is, because
its appearance defines it, and determines the whole
being that it is or has. Nothing given is either
physical or mental, in the sense of being intrinsically
a thing or a thought ; it is just a quality of being.
Essences (like " rocking ") which serve eventually to
describe material facts are given in intuitions which
are just as mental as those which supply psychological
terms for describing mental discourse. On the other
hand, essences (like " nausea ") used first perhaps for
describing discourse, mark crises in the flux of matter
just as precisely as those which are used to describe
material facts directly ; because discourse goes on in
animals subject to material influences. But in neither
case can the intuitions — which constitute discourse
and the mental sphere — be ever given in intuition.

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 93

They are posited in memory, expectation, and dramatic
psychology. The rocking I feel is called physical,
because the essence before me — say coloured planes
crossing — serves to report and designate very much
more complicated and prolonged movements in the
ship and the waves ; and the nausea I also feel is
called psychical, because it reports nothing (unless
my medical imagination intervenes) but is endured
pathetically, with a preponderating sense of time,
change, and danger, as it largely consists in feeling
how long this lasts, how upset I am, and how sick I
am about to be.

Again, if I see yellow once, my experience is called
a particular impression, and its object, yellow, is
supposed to exist and to be a particular too ; but if
I see yellow again, yellow has mysteriously become a
universal, a general idea, and an abstraction. Yet the
datum for intuition is throughout precisely the same.
No essence is abstract, yet none is a particular thing
or event, none is an object of belief, perception, or
pursuit, having a particular position in the context of
nature. Even the intuition, though it is an event,
cannot become an object of pursuit or perception ;
and its conventional place in history, when it has been
posited and is believed to have occurred, is assigned
to it only by courtesy, at the place and time of its
physical support, as a wife in some countries takes
her husband's name. Not the data of intuition, but
the objects of animal faith, are the particulars perceived :
they alone are the existing things or events to which
the animal is reacting and to which he is attributing
the essences which arise, as he does so, before his
fancy. These data of intuition are universals ; they
form the elements of such a description of the object
as is at that time possible ; they are never that object
itself, nor any part of it. Essences are not drawn out
or abstracted from things ; they are given before the

94 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

thing can be clearly perceived, since they are the
terms used in perception ; but they are not given
until attention is stretched upon the thing, which is
posited blindly in action ; and they come as revelations,
or oracles, delivered by that thing to the mind, and
symbolising it there. In itself, as suspended under
standing may suffer us to recognise it in reflection,
each essence is a positive and complete theme : it is
impossible that for experience anything should be more
concrete or individual than is this exact and total
appearance before me. Having never been parts of
any perceived object, it is impossible that given
essences should be abstracted from it. Being obvious
and immediate data they cannot even have that
congenital imperfection, that limp, which we might
feel in a broken arch, or in the half of anything already
familiar as a whole. But given essences are indeed
visionary, they are unsubstantial ; and in that respect
they seem strange and unearthly to an animal expecting
to work amongst things without realising their appear
ance. Yet ghostly as his instinct may deem them,
they are perfect pictures, with nothing abstract or
abstruse in their specious nature. The abstract is a
category posterior to intuition, and applicable only to
terms, such as numbers and other symbols of mathe
matics, which have been intentionally substituted for
other essences given earlier, by which they were
suggested ; but even these technical terms are abstract
only by accident and in function ; they have a concrete
essence of their own, and are constitutive elements of
perfectly definite structures in their own plane of
being, forming patterns and running into scales there,
like so much music.

Similarly, nothing given in sensation or thought is
in the least vague in itself. Vagueness is an adven
titious quality, which a given appearance may be said
to possess in relation to an object presumed to have

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 95

other determinations : as the cloud in Hamlet is but
a vague camel or a vague weasel, but for the landscape-
painter a perfectly definite cloud. The vague is
merely the too vague for some assumed purpose ; and
philosophers with a mania for accuracy, who find all
discourse vague that is discourse about anything in
the world of practice, are like critics of painting who
should find all colours and forms vague, when they
had been touched by aerial perspective, or made
poetical by the rich dyes of fancy and expression.
That sort of vagueness is perfection of artistic form,
as the other sort of vagueness may be perfection of
judgement : for knowledge lies in thinking aptly about
things, not in becoming like them. If the standard
of articulation in science were the articulation of
existence, science would be impossible for an animal
mind, and if it were possible would be useless :
because nothing would be gained for thought by
reproducing a mechanism without any adaptation of
its scale and perspective to the nature of the thinker.

If the instincts of man were well adapted to his
conditions, his thoughts, without being more accurate,
would not seem confused. As it is, intuition is most
vivid in the act of hunting or taking alarm, just when
mistakes are probable : and any obvious essence is
then precipitated upon the object, and quarrelled with
and dismissed if the object does not sustain it. An
essence, however evident, may even be declared
absent and inconceivable, if it cannot be attributed
absolutely to the substance of the object being chased
or eaten. The hungry nominalist may well say to
himself : '"If the hues of the pheasant are no part of
the bird, whence should he have fetched them ? Am
I not looking at the very creature I am pursuing and
hoping presently to devour ? And as my teeth and
hands cannot possibly add anything to the substance
they will seize upon, how should my eyes do so now ?

96 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

If therefore any alleged image can be proved to be
no part of my object, I must be mistaken in supposing
that I see such an image at all." This is also the
argument of the primitive painter, who knowing that
men have two eyes and their hands five fingers, will
not admit that their image might be less complete.
In this way the wand of that Queen Mab, intuition,
is assimilated by a too materialistic philosophy to a
tongue or an antenna, and required to reach out to the
object and stir it up, exploring its intrinsic quality and
structure. But it is a magic wand, and calls up only
wild and ignorant visions, mischievous and gaily
invented ; and if ever a philosopher dreams he has
fathomed the thing before him in action, that wand is
tickling his nose. Intuition cheats in enriching him,
and nature who whispers all these tales in his ear is
laughing at him and fondling him at the same time.
It is a kindly fiction ; because the dreams she inspires
are very much to his mind, and the lies she invents
for his benefit are her poetic masterpiece. Practical
men despise the poetry of poets, but they are well
pleased with their own. They would be ashamed of
amusements which might defeat their purposes, or
mislead them about the issue of events ; but they
embrace heartily the ingenuous fictions of the senses
which they almost recognise to be fictions, and even
the early myths and religions of mankind. These
they find true enough for practical and moral purposes ;
their playfulness is a convenient compendium for facts
too hard to understand ; they are the normal poetry
of observation and policy. Fancy disorganises conduct
only when it expresses vice ; and then it is the vice
that does the mischief, and not the fancy.

Even philosophers, when they wish to be very
plain and economical, sometimes fall to denying the
immediate. Fact-worship, which is an idolatry of
prudence, prejudices them against their own senses,

SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY 97

and against the mind, which is what prudence serves,
if it serves anything ; and perhaps they declare them
selves incapable of framing images with fewer deter
minations than they believe material things to possess.
If a material triangle must have a perfectly defined
shape (although at close quarters matter might elude
such confines), or if a material house must have a
particular number of bricks and a particular shade of
colour at each point of its surface, a professed em
piricist like Berkeley may be tempted to deny that he
can have an idea of a triangle, et cetera, without such
determinations ; whereas, however clear his visual
images may have been, it is certain he never could
have had, even in direct perception, an image specify
ing all the bricks or all the tints of any house, nor
the exact measure of any angle. Berkeley himself,
I suspect, was secretly intent upon essence, which in
every degree of conventional determination is its own
standard of completeness. But given essences have
any degree of vagueness in respect to the material or
mathematical objects which they may symbolise, and
to which Berkeley in his hasty nominalism wished to
assimilate them. He almost turned given essences
into substances, to take the place of those material
things which he had denied. Each essence is certainly
not two contradictory essences at once ; but the
definitions which render each precisely what it is lie
in the realm of essence, an infinite continuum of
discrete forms, not in the realm of existence. Essences,
in order to appear, do not need to beg leave of what
happens to exist, or to draw its portrait ; yet here the
trooping essences are, in such gradations and numbers
as intuition may lend them. It is not by hypostatising
them as they come that their roots in matter or their
scope in knowledge can be discovered.

Thus the discrimination of essence has a happy
tendency to liberalise philosophy, freeing it at once

H

98 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

from literalness and from scepticism. If all data are
symbols and all experience comes in poetic terms, it
follows that the human mind, both in its existence and
in its quality, is a free development out of nature, a
language or music the terms of which are arbitrary,
like the rules and counters of a game. It follows also
that the mind has no capacity and no obligation to
copy the world of matter nor to survey it impartially.
At the same time, it follows that the mind affords a
true expression of the world, rendered in vital per
spectives and in human terms, since this mind arises
and changes symptomatically at certain foci of animal
life ; foci which are a part of nature in dynamic corre
spondence with other parts, diffused widely about
them ; so that, for instance, alternative systems of
religion or science, if not taken literally, may equally
well express the actual operation of things measured
by different organs or from different centres.

CHAPTER XI

THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM

I HAVE now reached the culminating point of my
survey of evidence, and the entanglements I have left
behind me and the habitable regions I am looking for
lie spread out before me like opposite valleys. On the
one hand I see now a sweeping reason for scepticism,
over and above all particular contradictions or fanciful-
ness of dogma. Nothing is ever present to me except
some essence ; so that nothing that I possess in
intuition, or actually see, is ever there ; it can never
exist bodily, nor lie in that place or exert that power
which belongs to the objects encountered in action.
Therefore, if I regard my intuitions as knowledge of
facts, all my experience is illusion, and life is a dream.
At the same time I am now able to give a clearer
meaning to this old adage ; for life would not be a
dream, and all experience would not be illusion, if
I abstained from believing in them. The evidence
of data is only obviousness ; they give no evidence of
anything else ; they are not witnesses. If I am content
to recognise them for pure essences, they cannot
deceive me ; they will be like works of literary fiction,
more or less coherent, but without any claim to exist
on their own account. If I hypostatise an essence
into a fact, instinctively placing it in relations which
are not given within it, I am putting my trust in
animal faith, not in any evidence or implication of my

99

ioo SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

actual experience. I turn to an assumed world about
me, because I have organs for turning, just as I expect
a future to reel itself out without interruption because
I am wound up to go on myself. To such ulterior
things no manifest essence can bear any testimony.
They must justify themselves. If the ulterior fact is
some intuition elsewhere, its existence, if it happens to
exist, will justify that belief ; but the fulfilment of my
prophecy, in taking my present dream for testimony
to that ulterior experience, will be found only in the
realm of truth — a realm which is itself an object of
belief, never by any possibility of intuition, human or
divine. So too when the supposed fact is thought
of as a substance, its existence, if it is found in the
realm of nature, will justify that supposition ; but the
realm of nature is of course only another object of
belief, more remote if possible from intuition than
even the realm of truth. Intuition of essence, to which
positive experience and certitude are confined, is there
fore always illusion, if we allow our hypostatising
impulse to take it for evidence of anything else.

In adopting this conclusion of so many great
philosophers, that all is illusion, I do so, however, with
two qualifications. One is emotional and moral only,
in that I do not mourn over this fatality, but on the
contrary rather prefer speculation in the realm of
essence — if it can be indulged without practical in
convenience — to alleged information about hard facts.
It does not seem to me ignominious to be a poet, if
nature has made one a poet unexpectedly. Un
expectedly nature lent us existence, and if she has
made it a condition that we should be poets, she has
not forbidden us to enjoy that art, or even to be proud
of it. The other qualification is more austere : it
consists in not allowing exceptions. I cannot admit
that some particular essence — water, fire, being, atoms,
or Brahma — is the intrinsic essence of all things, so

THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM 101

that if I narrow my imagination to that one intuition
I shall have intuited the heart and the whole of
existence. Of course I do not deny that there is
water and that there is being, the former in most
things on earth, and the latter in everything anywhere ;
but these images or words of mine are not the things
they designate, but only names for them. Desultory
and partial propriety these names may have, but no
metaphysical privilege. No more has the expedient
of some modern critics who would take illusion as a
whole and call it the universe ; for in the first place
they are probably reverting to belief in discourse, as
conventionally conceived, so that their scepticism is
halting ; and in the second place, even if human
experience could be admitted as known and vouched
for, there would be an incredible arrogance in positing
it as the whole of being, or as itself confined to the
forms and limits which the critic assigns to it. The
life of reason as I conceive it is a mere romance, and
the life of nature a mere fable ; such pictures have
no metaphysical value, even if as sympathetic fictions
they had some psychological truth.

The doctrine of essence thus renders my scepticism
invincible and complete, while reconciling me with
it emotionally.

If now I turn my face in the other direction and
consider the prospect open to animal faith, I see that
all this insecurity and inadequacy of alleged knowledge
are almost irrelevant to the natural effort of the mind
to describe natural things . The discouragement we may
feel in science does not come from failure ; it comes
from a false conception of what would be success.
Our worst difficulties arise from the assumption that
knowledge of existences ought to be literal, whereas
knowledge of existences has no need, no propensity,
and no fitness to be literal. It is symbolic initially,
when a sound, a smell, an indescribable feeling are

SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

signals to the animal of his dangers or chances ; and
it fulfils its function perfectly — I mean its moral
function of enlightening us about our natural good —
if it remains symbolic to the end. Can anything be
more evident than that religion, language, patriotism,
love, science itself speak in symbols ? Given essences
unify for intuition, in entirely adventitious human
terms, the diffuse processes of nature ; the aesthetic
image — the sound, the colour, the expanse of space,
the scent, taste, and sweet or cruel pressure of bodies
—wears an aspect altogether unlike the mechanisms
it stands for. Sensation and thought (between which
there is no essential difference) work in a conventional
medium, as do literature and music. The experience
of essence is direct ; the expression of natural facts
through that medium is indirect. But this indirection
is no obstacle to expression, rather its condition ; and
this vehicular manifestation of things may be know
ledge of them, which intuition of essence is not. The
theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more
truly than history, because the medium has a kindred
movement to that of real life, though an artificial
setting and form ; and much in the same way the
human medium of knowledge can perform its pertinent
synthesis and make its pertinent report all the better
when it frankly abandons the plane of its object and
expresses in symbols what we need to know of it.
The arts of expression would be impossible if they
were not extensions of normal human perception.
The Greeks recognised that astronomy and history
were presided over by Muses, sisters of those of tragic
and comic poetry ; had they been as psychological
as modern reflection has become, they might have had
Muses of sight, hearing, and speech. I think they
honoured, if they did not express, this complementary
fact also, that all the Muses, even the most playful,
are witnesses to the nature of things. The arts are

THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM 103

evidences of wisdom, and sources of it ; they include
science. No Muse would be a humane influence,
nor worthy of honour, if she did not studiously express
the truth of nature with the liberty and grace appro
priate to her special genius.

Philosophers would not have overlooked the fact
that knowledge is, and ought to be, symbolical, if
intuition did not exist also, giving them a taste of
something which perhaps they think higher and more
satisfying. Intuition, when it is placid and masterful
enough to stand alone, free from anxiety or delusion
about matters of fact, is a delightful exercise, like
play ; it employs our imaginative faculty without
warping it, and lets us live without responsibility.
The playful and godlike mind of philosophers has
always been fascinated by intuition ; philosophers — I
mean the great ones — are the infant prodigies of
reflection. They often take intuition of essence for
their single ideal, and wish to impose it on the worka
day thoughts of men ; they make a play-world for
themselves which it is glorious to dominate, much as
other men of genius, prolonging the masterfulness of
childhood, continue to play at this or at that in their
politics and their religion. But knowledge of existence
has an entirely different method and an entirely
different ideal. It is playful too, because its terms
are intuitive and its grammar or logic often very
subjective. Perception, theory, hypothesis are rapid,
pregnant, often humorous ; they seize a fact by its
skirts from some unexpected quarter, and give it a
nickname which it might be surprised to hear, such
as the rainbow or the Great Bear. Yet in the investiga
tion of facts all this play of mind is merely instru
mental and indicative : the intent is practical, the
watchfulness earnest, the spirit humble. The mind
here knows that it is at school ; and even its fancies are
docile. Its nicknames for things and for their odd

104 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

ways of behaving are like those which country people
give to flowers ; they often pointedly describe how
things look or what they do to us. The ideas we have
of things are not fair portraits ; they are political
caricatures made in the human interest ; but in their
partial way they may be masterpieces of characterisa
tion and insight. Above all, they are obtained by
labour, by investigating what is not given, and by
correcting one impression by another, drawn from the
same object — a thing impossible in the intuition of
essences. They therefore conduce to wisdom, and
in their perpetual tentativeness have a cumulative
truth.

Consider the reason why, instead of cultivating
congenial intuitions, a man may be drawn to the study
of nature at all. It is because things, by their impact,
startle him into attention and a new thought. Such
external objects interest him for what they do, not for
what they are ; and knowledge of them is significant,
not for the essence it displays to intuition (beautiful
as this may be) but for the events it expresses or
foreshadows. It matters little therefore to the per
tinent knowledge of nature that the substance of
things should remain recondite or unintelligible, if
their movement and operation can be rightly deter
mined on the plane of human perception. It matters
little if their very existence is vouched for only by
animal faith and presumption, so long as this faith
posits existence where existence is, and this presump
tion expresses a prophetic preadaptation of animal
instincts to the forces of the environment. The
function of perception and natural science is, not to
flatter the sense of omniscience in an absolute mind,
but to dignify animal life by harmonising it, in action
and in thought, with its conditions. It matters little
if the news these methods can bring us of the world
is fragmentary and is expressed rhetorically ; what

THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM 105

matters is that science should be integrated with art,
and that the arts should substitute the dominion of
man over circumstances, as far as this is possible, for
the dominion of chance. In this there is no sacrifice
of truth to utility ; there is rather a wise direction of
curiosity upon things on the human scale, and within
the range of art. Speculation beyond those limits
cannot be controlled, and is irresponsible ; and the
symbolic terms in which it must be carried on, even
at close quarters, are the best possible indications for
the facts in question. All these inadequacies and
imperfections are proper to perfect signs, which should
be brief and sharply distinguished.

Complete scepticism is accordingly not inconsistent
with animal faith ; the admission that nothing given
exists is not incompatible with belief in things not
given. I may yield to the suasion of instinct, and
practise the arts with a humble confidence, without
in the least disavowing the most rigorous criticism of
knowledge or hypostatising any of the data of sense
or fancy. And I need not do this with a bad conscience,
as Parmenides and Plato and the Indians seem to have
done, when they admitted illusion or opinion as an
epilogue to their tight metaphysics, on the ground
that otherwise they would miss their way home. It
is precisely by not yielding to opinion and illusion,
and by not delegating any favourite essences to be the
substance of things, that I aspire to keep my cognitive
conscience pure and my practical judgement sane ;
because in order to find my way home I am by no
means compelled to yield ignominiously to any animal
illusion ; what guides me there is not illusion but
habit ; and the intuitions which accompany habit are
normal signs for the circle of objects and forces by
which that habit is sustained. The images of sense
and science will not delude me if instead of hypostatis
ing them, as those philosophers did the terms of their

106 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

dialectic, I regard them as graphic symbols for home
and for the way there. That such external things
exist, that I exist myself, and live more or less pros
perously in the midst of them, is a faith not founded
on reason but precipitated in action, and in that intent,
which is virtual action, involved in perception. This
faith, which it would be dishonest not to confess that
I share, does no violence to a sceptical analysis of
experience ; on the contrary, it takes advantage of
that analysis to interpret this volatile experience as all
animals do and must, as a set of symbols for existences
that cannot enter experience, and which, since they
are not elements in knowledge, no analysis of know
ledge can touch — they are in another realm of being.

I propose now to consider what objects animal
faith requires me to posit, and in what order ; without
for a moment forgetting that my assurance of their
existence is only instinctive, and my description of
their nature only symbolic. I may know them by
intent, based on bodily reaction ; I know them initially
as whatever confronts me, whatever it may turn out
to be, just as I know the future initially as whatever
is coming, without knowing what will come. That
something confronts me here, now, and from a specific
quarter, is in itself a momentous discovery. The
aspect this thing wears, as it first attracts my attention,
though it may deceive me in some particulars, can
hardly fail to be, in some respects, a telling indication
of its nature in its relation to me. Signs identify
their objects for discourse, and show us where to look
for their undiscovered qualities. Further signs, catch
ing other aspects of the same object, may help me to
lay siege to it from all sides ; but signs will never lead
me into the citadel, and if its inner chambers are ever
opened to me, it must be through sympathetic imagina
tion. I might, by some happy unison between my
imagination and its generative principles, intuit the

THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM 107

essence which is actually the essence of that thing.
In that case (which may often occur when the object
is a sympathetic mind) knowledge of existence, without
ceasing to be instinctive faith, will be as complete and
adequate as knowledge can possibly be. The given
essence will be the essence of the object meant ; but
knowledge will remain a claim, since the intuition is
not satisfied to observe the given essence passively
as a disembodied essence, but instinctively affirms it
to be the essence of an existence confronting me,
and beyond the range of my possible apprehension.
Therefore the most perfect knowledge of fact is perfect
only pictorially, not evidentially, and remains subject
to the end to the insecurity inseparable from animal
faith, and from life itself.

Animal faith being a sort of expectation and open-
mouthedness, is earlier than intuition ; intuitions
come to help it out and lend it something to posit.
It is more than ready to swallow any suggestion of
sense or fancy ; and perhaps primitive credulity, as
in a dream, makes no bones of any contradiction or
incongruity in successive convictions, but yields its
whole soul to every image. Faith then hangs like a
pendulum at rest ; but when perplexity has caused
that pendulum to swing more and more madly, it
may for a moment stop quivering at a point of unstable
equilibrium at the top ; and this vertical station may
be likened to universal scepticism. It is a more
wonderful and a more promising equilibrium than
the other, because it cannot be maintained ; but
before declining from the zenith and desisting from
pointing vertically at zero, the pendulum of faith may
hesitate for an instant which way to fall, if at that
uncomfortable height it has really lost all animal
momentum and all ancient prejudice. Before giving
my reasons — which are but prejudices and human—
for believing in events, in substances, and in the

io8 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

variegated truths which they involve, it may be well
to have halted for breath at the apex of scepticism,
and felt all the negative privileges of that position.
The mere possibility of it in its purity is full of instruc
tion ; and although I have, for my own part, dwelt
upon it only ironically, by a scruple of method, and
intending presently to abandon it for common sense,
many a greater philosopher has sought to maintain
himself acrobatically at that altitude. They have not
succeeded ; but an impossible dwelling-place may
afford, like a mountain-top, a good point of view in
clear weather from which to map the land and choose
a habitation.

CHAPTER XII

IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES

HUMAN beliefs and ideas (which in modern philosophy
are called human knowledge) may be arranged system
atically in various different series or orders. One is
the order of genesis. The origin of beliefs and ideas,
as of all events, is natural. All origins lie in the realm
of matter, even when the being that is so generated is
immaterial, because this creation or intrusion of the
immaterial follows on material occasions and at the
promptings of circumstance. It is safe to say this,
although it may sound dogmatical, since an immaterial
being not grafted in this way upon material events
would be undiscoverable ; no place, time, or other
relations in nature could be assigned to it, and even if
by chance it existed it would have to exist only for its
own benefit, unreported to any one else. It is accord
ingly in the realm of matter, in the order of events in
animal life, that I must distribute human beliefs and
ideas if I wish to arrange them in the order of their
genesis.

Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the
order of discovery, as within the field of human grammar
and thought they come to be discriminated. Such a
survey would be a biography of reason, in which I
should neglect the external occasions on which ideas
and beliefs arise and study only the changing patterns
which they form in the eye of thought, as in a kaleido-

109

no SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

scope. What would probably come first in the order
of discovery would be goods and evils ; or a romantic
metaphysician might turn this experience into a fable,
referring goods and evils to a transcendental will
which should pronounce them (for no reason) to be
such respectively. Will or moral bias is actually the
background on which images of objects are gradually
deciphered by an awakening intellect ; they all appear
initially loaded with moral values and assigned to rival
camps and quarters in the field of action. Discovery
is essentially romantic ; there is less clearness in the
objects that appear than there is vehemence in the
assertion and choice of them. The life of reason is
accordingly a subject to be treated imaginatively, and
interpreted afresh by every historian with legitimate
variations ; and if no theme lies nearer to the heart
of man, since it is the history of his heart, none is
more hopelessly the sport of apperception and of
dramatic bias in the telling.

Finally, beliefs and ideas may be marshalled in the
order of evidence ; and this is the only method that
concerns me here. At any juncture in the life of
reason a man may ask himself, as I am doing in this
book, what he is most certain of, and what he believes
only on hearsay or by some sort of suggestion or
impulse of his own, which might be suspended or
reversed. Alternative logics and creeds might thus
suggest themselves, raised in different styles of archi
tecture upon the bed-rock, if there is a bed-rock, of
perfect certitude. I have already discovered what
this bed-rock of perfect certitude is ; somewhat dis
concertingly, it turns out to be in the regions of the
rarest ether. I have absolute assurance of nothing
save of the character of some given essence ; the rest
is arbitrary belief or interpretation added by my
animal impulse. The obvious leaves me helpless ; for
among objects in the realm of essence I can establish

IDENTITY AND DURATION in

none of the distinctions which I am most concerned
to establish in daily life, such as that between true and
false, far or near, just now and long ago, once upon a
time, and in five minutes. All these terms of course
are found there, else I could not mention them, but
they are found only as pictures ; each is present only
in essence, without any reason for choosing, asserting,
or making it effective. The very opposite terms, if
I am only willing to think of them, lie sleeping side
by side with these which I happen first to have
come upon. All essences and combinations of essences
are brother-shapes in an eternal landscape ; and the
more I range in that wilderness, the less reason I find
for stopping at anything, or for following any par
ticular path. Willingly or regretfully, if I wish to live,
I must rouse myself from this open-eyed trance into
which utter scepticism has thrown me. I must allow
subterranean forces within me to burst forth and to
shatter that vision. I must consent to be an animal
or a child, and to chase the fragments as if they were
things of moment. But which fragment, and rolling
in what direction ? I am resigned to being a dog
matist ; but at what point shall my dogmatism begin,
and by what first solicitation of nature ?

Starting, as here I should, from absolute certitude
—that is, from the obvious character of some essence —
the first object of belief suggested by that assurance
is the identity of this essence in various instances and
in various contexts. This identity in divers cases is
not tautological, as identity would be if I spoke of
the identity of any essence with itself. Identity, to be
significant, must be problematical. I must pick up
my pebble twice, so that a juggler might without my
knowledge have substituted another pebble for it in
the interval ; and when I say confidently, the same
pebble, I may always be deceived. My own thought
is not at all unlikely to play this trick on me ; it is

ii2 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

good at legerdemain. In attending a second time to
what I call the same essence, I may really summon a
different essence before me ; my memory need not
retain the first intuition so precisely that its disparity
from the present one can be sensible to me now.
Identity of essences given at different times evidently
presupposes time — an immense postulate ; and besides,
it presupposes ability in thought to traverse time
without confusion, so that having lived through two
intuitions I may correctly distinguish them as events,
whilst correctly identifying their common object.
These are ambitious and highly questionable dogmas.
Yet there is a circumstance in pure intuition of any
essence which can insensibly lead me to those elaborate
conclusions, and can lead me at the same time to posit
the natural existence of myself, the possible dupe,
having those intuitions and surviving them, and even
the existence of my natural object, the persisting
pebble, which those intuitions described unanimously.
This circumstance is closely connected with the
property of essence which is most ideal and remote
from existence, namely, its eternity. Eternity, taken
intrinsically, has nothing to do with time, but is a
form of being which time cannot usher in nor destroy ;
it is always equally real, silent, and indestructible, no
matter what time may do, or what time it may be.
But intuition peruses eternal being in time ; con
sequently, so long as I am attending to an essence,
this essence seems to me to endure ; and when, after
an interval, I revert to it or to any feature of it, this
feature seems to me to be identical with what it was.
This identity and this duration are not properly pre
dicated of essence in its own realm ; they are super
fluous epithets essentially, and almost insults, because
they substitute a questionable for an unquestionable
subsistence in the essence. Yet the epithets are well
meant, and indicate fairly enough the aspect which

IDENTITY AND DURATION 113

essences present to moving thought when it plays upon
them. Intuition finds essence by watching, by exert
ing animal attention. Now when he watches, an
animal thinks that what he watches is watching him
with the same intensity and variability of attention
which he is exerting ; for attention is fundamentally
an animal uneasiness, fostered by the exigences of
life amid other material beings that can change and
jump. Stillness or constancy in any object accordingly
does not seem to an animal eternity in an essence ; it
seems rather a suspension of motion in a thing, a
pause for breath, an ominous and awful silence. He
is superstitious about the eternity of essences, as about
all their other properties. This breathless and ghostly
duration which he attributes to essences, treating them
like living things, is his confused temporal translation
of their eternity, mixing it with existence, which is
the negation of eternity. Thus he assimilates it to
the quasi-permanence in himself which is transfused
with change ; for of course he is far from perceiving
that if essences were not natively eternal and non
existent, it would be impossible for crawling existence
to change from one form to another. This illusion is
inevitable. The dubious and iterative duration proper
to animal life, when the lungs breathe and the mind is
appetitive, seems to this mind a pulsation in all being.
Moreover, in watching any image, it is often
possible to observe one feature in it persisting while
another disappears. The man not only says to him
self, " This, and still this," but he ventures to say,
' This, and again this with a variation." A variation
in this ? Here, from the point of view of essence, is
a sheer absurdity. This cannot change its nature,
though what we have before us a moment later may be
something but slightly different from this ; and of
course the essence now brought to view can be slightly
different from the one formerly in evidence only

I

n4 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

because each is eternally itself, so that the least variant
from it marks and constitutes a different essence.
Material categories such as existence, substance, and
change, none of which are applicable to pure data, are
thus insinuated by the animal intellect into contempla
tion. They transform intuition into belief ; and this
belief, as if it would reinforce essences when they
appear and annul them when they disappear, ultimately
posits an imaginary shuffling of sensible existences —
hypostatised essences — dancing about us as we watch
the scene. Even if this hypostasis is retracted after
wards by the critic, the postulate remains that he is
steadily perusing the same essence, or returning to
reconsider it. Without this postulate it would be
impossible to say or think anything on any subject.
No essence could be recognised, and therefore no
change could be specified. Yet this necessary belief
is one impossible to prove or even to defend by
argument, since all argument presupposes it. It must
be accepted as a rule of the game, if you think the
game worth playing.

What shall I say of the probable truth of such
fundamental assumptions ? Shall I think them false,
because groundless, and shall I say that they invalidate
the whole edifice of natural faith which is raised upon
them ? Or shall I say that the experienced security
of this edifice justifies them and implies their truth ?
Neither ; because the happy results and fertility of
an assumption do not prove it true literally, but only
prove it to be suitable, to be worth cultivating as an
art and repeating as a good myth. The axioms of
sanity and art must correspond somehow to truth, but
the correspondence may be very loose and very partial.
Moreover, the circumstance that even this symbolic
Tightness is vouched for only by an experience which
would be false in all its records and memories if this
assumption were false, robs such experimental tests of

IDENTITY AND DURATION 115

all logical force. Corroboration is no new argument ;
if I am deceived once, I may all the more readily be
deceived again. In the perspectives of experience I
cannot, except in these very perspectives, reach the
terms which they posit as self-existent, in order to see
whether my perspectives were rightly drawn. I am
in the region of belief mediated by symbols, in the
region of animal faith.

CHAPTER XIII

BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION

THE essence which is the object of intuition is probably
not simple. Perhaps nothing that has a character
recognisable in reflection can be utterly simple. The
datum may seem purely qualitative, like a smell or
like absolute Being, and yet some plurality may lurk
in its very diffuseness or continuity, giving a foothold
for discrimination of different moments or parts
within it. Usually this inward complexity of given
essences is very marked, and a chief element in their
nature ; but it is not at all incompatible with the
aesthetic and logical individuality which makes them
terms for possible recognition and discourse. Essences,
like things, may be perfectly unambiguous objects to
name or to point to, and may be counted as units,
without prejudice to their internal complexity. My
dog is one and the same dog unmistakably, without
prejudice to the possibly infinite complexity of his
organism or the interpenetration of his qualities. In
the same way Euclidean space is a single and definite
essence ; yet its character is subject to analysis. I
may say it has three dimensions, is necessarily infinite,
without scale, etc. These implications, which I may
enumerate successively, lie in the essence together,
and lie there from the beginning, even if my intuition is
slow to disentangle them, or never does so at all. The
simplicity of the essence given at first was a pregnant

116

BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION 117

simplicity ; it had enough character to be identified
with the total and unitary aspect of another essence —
Euclidean space analysed — which may appear later.

Intuition therefore is a view of essence, attention
fixed upon it, and not that essence itself. When I
say Euclidean space has three dimensions, I am
counting them ; I am proceeding from one specious
plane, or felt direction of motion, to another, and
perhaps back again, for the sake of verification. If
this operation is to be a valid survey of the essence
proposed, the plane or directions specified must, so
to speak, stay in their places. Each must remain
itself, so that in passing from it to another, as I do in
counting, I may pass to something truly different, and
may be able to revert from this to the original element,
and find it still there, identical with its former self.
But, as I have already discovered, this self - identity
of a term to which I revert cannot be given either in
the first intuition of it, nor in the second. All that
either intuition can yield while it endures is the
nature of the datum there, with the terms and relations
which are displayed there within it. Intuition can
never yield the relation of its total datum to anything
not given. It cannot refer to the latent at all, since
its object, by definition, is just what is given im
mediately. To take the leap from one intuition to
another, and assert that they view the same essence,
or have the same intent, I must take my life in my
hands and trust to animal faith. Otherwise all dia
lectic would be arrested.

Let me assume in the first place that I may steadily
peruse the same essence, and may revert to it on
occasion. Let me assume further that in so doing I
may turn passive intuition into analysis, and analysis
into some fresh synthesis of the elements identified
and distinguished in the given essence. Intuition
will thus pick up and group together, in various ways,

n8 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

terms which by hypothesis are identical in these
various settings. It will scrutinise essences piece
meal and successively, although in their own realm
they compose a simultaneous and eternal manifold.
Suppose, for instance, I have reached the conclusion
of a calculation, and the final equation is before me :
the inner relations between its terms are parts of a
given essence. Intuition, not demonstration, syn-
thesises this manifold. This synthetic essence is
therefore no conclusion ; it is not an answer nor a
deduction ; it is not true. It is simply the pattern
of terms which it is ; no one of these terms, for aught
I know, having ever figured in any other equation.
Thus any survey which is analytic, so that it gives
foothold for demonstration, or any definition follow
ing upon such analysis, presupposes the repetition of
the same essences in different contexts. This pre
supposition cannot be justified by the intuition occupy
ing the mind at any one time. No more can the
assurance that a term remains the same in two successive
instances and in two different contexts, nor that what
is asserted by a predicate is asserted of the very subject
which before had been intuited without that predicate.
Explication is a process, a deduction is an event ; and
although the force of logical analysis or synthesis does
not depend on assuming that fact, but rather on
ignoring it, this fact may be deduced from faith in
the validity of demonstration, which would lapse if this
fact were denied. The validity of demonstration is
accordingly a matter of faith only, depending on the
assumption of matters of fact incapable of demonstra
tion. I must believe that I noted the terms of the
argument separately and successively if I am to assert
anything in identifying them or pronouncing them
equivalent, or if the conclusion in which they appear
now is to be relevant in any way to the premises in
which they appeared originally.

BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION 119

The force of dialectic, then, lies in identifying
terms in isolation with the same terms in relation ; so
that even an analytic judgement is synthetic. To say,
for instance, that in " extended colour " " extension "
is involved is analysis ; yet to identify the element of
extension abstracted from the first essence with the
second essence as a whole, is synthesis ; and it is far
from inconceivable that this synthesis should be
erroneous. In the identification of an essence given
in one intuition with something given in another
intuition in a superadded context, there is a postulate
that in transcendent intent I am hitting a hidden
target. It is not two similar intuitions taken existenti-
ally that are identified ; they are not only admittedly
distinct numerically and as events in the world, but
they have, by hypothesis, different total data before
them. It is mind, a spiritual counterpart of attitude
and action, that intends in both cases to consider the
same essence. There is repetition posited ; and
repetition, if actual, involves adventitious differences
accruing to a term that remains individually identical.
There is a difference in the setting of the same essence
here and its setting there. In judgement, accordingly,
there is more than intuition ; there is assumed dis
course, involving time, transcendent reference, and
various adventitious surveys of identical objects.
Thus if I wish to believe that any demonstration
whatsoever is significant or correct, I must assume
(what I can never demonstrate) that there is an active
intelligence at work, capable of reverting to an old
idea like the dog returning to his vomit : an operation
utterly extraneous to the timeless identity of each
element recovered.

In other words, demonstration is an event, even
when the thing demonstrated is not an event. Without
adventitious choice of some starting-point, without
selective and cumulative advance, and without re-

120 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

capitulation, there would be no dialectic. Premises
and conclusions would all be static and separate
terms ; the dialectical nerve of their relation would
not be laid bare and brought to intuition. I should
know nothing about essence, in the sense of possessing
such sciences of it as mathematics or rhetoric, if the
argument were not adventitious to the subject-matter,
casting the light of intuition now along this path and
now along that in a field posited as static, so as to
enlarge and confirm my apprehension of it ; for if I
lost at one end all that I gained at the other, my
progress would not enrich apprehension, nor ever
twice mean the same thing. Dialectic therefore is a
two-edged sword : on the one hand, if valid, it involves
a realm of essence, independent of it, over which it
may range ; and on the other hand it involves its own
temporal and progressive existence ; since it is a
name for the fact that some part of that realm of
essence has been chosen for perusal, considered at
leisure, folded upon itself, as it were, and recognised
as having this or that articulation. Even pure in
tuition shares (as I shall try to show presently) this
spiritual existence, distinct from the logical or aesthetic
being proper to the essences it apprehends ; intuition
itself can hardly be prolonged without winking or
re-survey. But this coming and going of attention, in
flashes and in varied assaults, is even more conspicuous
in dialectic ; and the validity and advance of insight
in such cases depends on the essences in hand being
constant, in spite of the pulsations of attention upon
them and the variety of relations disclosed successively.
Thus belief in the existence of mental discourse
(which is a sort of experience), whilst of course not
demonstrable in itself, is involved in the validity of
any demonstration ; and I come to the interesting
insight that dialectic would lose all its force if I
renounced my instinctive faith in my ability to pick

BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION 121

up old meanings, to think consecutively, to correct
myself without changing my subject-matter, and in
fine to discourse and to live rationally. Challenge
this faith, and demonstration collapses into the illusion
that a demonstration has been made. If I confine
myself to the given essence without admitting discourse
about it, I exclude all analysis of that essence, or even
examination of it. I must simply stare at it, in a
blank and timeless aesthetic trance. If this does not
happen, the reason is not dialectical. No logic could
drive me from the obvious, unless I read omens in
it which are not there. The reason for my proclivity
to play with ideas, to lose them and catch them, and
pride myself on my ability to keep them circling
without confusion in the air, is a vital reason. This
logic is a fly-wheel in my puffing engine ; it is not
logic at all. The animal life which underlies discourse
is concerned to discharge its predetermined responses,
which are but few, whenever an occasion presents
itself which will at all do ; and all such occasions it
calls the same. It claps some recurrent name on
different objects, which is one source of error or of
perpetual inaccuracy in its knowledge of things ; but
even before that, in identifying the various instances
of that name, alleging the essence present now to be
the same present before, it runs a risk of error and
may slip into self-contradiction. Is the round square
an essence ? Certainly ; but not in the geometry
of Euclid, because in his geometry the square is
one essence and the circle another, definitely and
irreparably distinct from it. The round square is an
essence of comic discourse, actualised when, having
confused names, definitions and ideas, a fumbling or
an impudent mind sets about to identify two incom-
patibles ; and this attempt is no more impossible to
a mind — which is subject to animal vapours — than
it is impossible for such a mind to look for a lost

122 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

word. The psyche has the lost word in store, as it
has the intuitions of the circle and the square ; but
the loss of memory or the confusion of ideas may arise
notwithstanding, because the movement in discourse
which should culminate in those intuitions may be
intercepted mechanically, and arrested at a stage
where the name is not yet recovered, or where the
words circle and square have fused their associations
and are striving to terminate in the intuition of both
as one. Such stammerings and contradictions make
evident the physical basis of thought and the remote
level from which it turns to its ideal object, like the
moth to the star ; but this physical basis is really just
as requisite for correcting a logical error as for falling
into it. Thus dialectic, which in intent and deliverance
does not trespass beyond the realm of essence, but
only defines some fragment of the same, yet in fact,
if it is to be cogent, must presuppose time, change,
and the persistence of meanings in progressive dis
course.

Belief in demonstration, when it is admitted, has
inversely some steadying influence on belief in matters
of fact. When poetic idealists cry that life is a dream,
they are indulging in a hyperbole, if they still venture
to compare one illusion with another in beauty or in
duration. Poetry, like demonstration, would not be
possible if intuition of essences could not be sustained
and repeated in various contexts. The poet could
not otherwise express cumulative passions nor develop
particular themes. But life is no dream, if it justifies
dialectic ; because dialectic explores various parts of
the realm of essence — where everything is steadfast,
distinct, and imperishable — with a continuous and
coherent intent, and reaches valid insight into their
structure ; and this amount of wakefulness and sanity
the dialectical or poetic mind would have in any case,
even in the absence of a material world, of all moral

BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION 123

interests, and of any life except the life of discourse
itself.

Nevertheless, if discourse were always a pellucid
apprehension of essential relations, its existence would
be little noted ; only a very scrupulous philosopher
would insist on it, in view of the selective order and
direction of survey which discourse adds to its subject-
matter. There is, however, a much louder witness to
the fact that discourse exists and is no part of essence,
but rather a function of animal life ; and this witness
is error. Thought becomes obvious when things
betray it ; as they cannot have been false, something
else must have been so, and this something else,
which we call thought, must have existed and must
have had a different status from that of the thing it
falsified. Error thus awakens even the laziest philo
sophy from the dream of supposing that its own
meanderings are nothing but strands in the texture of
its object.

I have now, by the mere consideration of the way
in which essence presents itself, managed to snatch
from the jaws of scepticism one belief familiar to me
before I encountered that romantic dragon ; namely,
belief in the existence of discourse, or of mind think
ing. But be it observed that I have so far seen reason
for reinstating this belief only in a very attenuated
form. Thought here means nothing more than the
fact that some essence is contemplated, and discourse
means only that this essence is approached and surveyed
repeatedly or piecemeal, with partiality, succession,
and possible confusion in describing it. Save for
this distinction of intuition from the essence intuited,
I have as yet no object before me that claims existence
or solicits belief. The whole datum is still simply
an essence ; but by the mere study of that datum,
when this study is reflected upon and admitted, I
have reintroduced a belief which relieves me of what

i24 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

was most obnoxious to the flesh in my radical scepti
cism. I have found that even when no change is
perceived in the image before me, my discourse changes
its phases and makes progress in surveying it ; so
that in discourse I now admit a sphere of events in
which real variations are occurring. I may now assert,
when I perceive a motion, that this intuition of change
is true ; that is, that it has actually followed upon the
intuition of a static first term, from which my attention
has passed to this intuition of change ; and this I
may now assert without confusing the essences given
successively, or trying, like animal perception, to
knead one concrete thing out of their incompatible
natures. The existence of changing things or events
in nature I may still deny or doubt or ignore ; in the
object I shall, with perfect clearness, see only an
essence, and if this happens to be the essence of
change, and to present the image of some motion,
that theme will seem to me as determinate, as ideal
and as unchanging as any other, and as little prone
to lapse into any different theme. Any motion seen
will be but a fixed image of motion. Actual flux
and actual existence will have their appropriate and
sufficient seat in my thought ; I shall conceive and
believe, when I reflect on my rapt contemplations,
that I have been ruminating, and passing from one to
another ; but these objects will be only the several
essences, the several images or tunes or stories, each
always itself, which my mind picks up or invents or
reconsiders.

CHAPTER XIV

ESSENCE AND INTUITION

To believe nothing and live immersed in intuition
might be the privilege of a disembodied spirit ; and
if a man could share it he would not only be relieved
from doubt but would, in one dimension, lose nothing
in the scope of his experience, since the realm of
essence, which wrould still be open to him, is absolutely
infinite, and contains images of all the events that any
existing world could enact, or that all possible worlds
could enact together. Yet all this variety and richness
would form a mosaic, a marble effigy of life, or chronicle
of ancient wars. The pangs and horrors would be
there, as well as the beauties, but each would burn in
its eternal place, balancing all the rest, and no anxious
eye would glance hurriedly from one to the other,
wondering what the next might be. The spirit that
actually breathes in man is an animal spirit, transitive
like the material endeavours which it expresses ; it
has a material station and accidental point of view,
and a fevered preference for one alternative issue over
another. It thirsts for news ; and this curiosity,
which it borrows of course from the insecurity and
instinctive anxiety of the animal whose spirit it is,
is strangely self-contradictory ; because the further it
ranges in the service of animal will, the more the
spectacle it discloses rebukes that animal will and
tends to neutralise it. It would indeed not be spirit

125

i26 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

at all if it did not essentially tend to discount its
accidental point of view, and to exchange the material
station to which it finds itself unaccountably attached
in its birth. In so far as it is spirit, and is not called
back by its animal allegiance to pleasures and ambitions
which pure spirit could not share (since they imply
ignorance), it accordingly tends to withdraw from
preoccupation with animal life, from the bias of time
and place, and from all thought of existence. In so
doing, far from perishing, it seems to acquire a more
intense, luminous, and placid being. Since the roots
of spirit, at least in man, are in matter, this would
seem to be an illusion ; yet the experience is normal,
and no illusion need attach to it, if once the nature
of intuition is understood.

At the vanishing-point of scepticism, which is also
the acme of life, intuition is absorbed in its object.
For this reason, philosophers capable of intense con
templation — Aristotle, for instance, at those points
where his thought becomes, as it were, internal to
spirit — have generally asserted that in the end essence
and the contemplation of essence are identical. Cer
tainly the intuition of essence is oblivious of itself,
and cognisant of essence only, to which it adds nothing
whatever internally, either in character or in intensity ;
because the intensity of a thunder-clap is the chief
part of its essence, and so the peculiar intolerableness
of each sort of pain, or transitiveness of each sort of
pleasure. If in fact when any such essence is given
there had been nothing prior to this intuition, nothing
beside it existentially, and nothing to follow upon it,
this obliviousness to the intuition itself, as distinct
from the given essence, would not be an oversight ;
it would be rather an absence of illusion. For it
would then have been an illusion to suppose, as I
should in calling the presence of that essence an
intuition of it, that a soul with a history and with

ESSENCE AND INTUITION 127

other adventitious qualities had come to contemplate
that essence at one moment in its career. There
would really be the essence only, with no relations
other than those perfectly irreversible internal ones
to other essences which define it in its own realm.
Those very high numbers, for instance, which nobody
has ever thought of specifically, have no other relations
than those which they have eternally in the series of
whole numbers ; they have no place in any man's life.
So too those many forms of torment for which nature
does not provide the requisite instrument, and which
even hell has neglected to exemplify ; they remain
essences only, of which fortunately there is no intuition.
Evidently the being of such numbers or such torments
is constituted by their essence only, and has not
attained to existence. Yet it is this essential being
alone that, if there was intuition of those numbers or
those torments, would be revealed in intuition ; for
no external adventitious relations, such as the intuition
has in the life of some soul, would be presented
within it, if (as I assume) nothing but these essences
was then given.

It is therefore inevitable that minds singly absorbed
in the contemplation of any essence should attribute
the presence and force of that essence to its own
nature, which alone is visible, and not to their intuition,
which is invisible. Thought as it sinks into its object
rises in its deliverance out of the sphere of contingency
and change, and loses itself in that object, sublimated
into an essence. This sublimation is no loss ; it is
merely absence of distraction. It is the perfect
fruition and fulfilment of that experience. In this
manner I can understand why Aristotle could call the
realm of essence, or that part of it which he had
considered, a deity, and could declare sublimely that
its inalienable being was an eternal life. More strictly,
it would have been an eternal actualisation of cognitive

128 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

life only ; animal life would have ceased, because
animal life requires us to pick up and drop the essences
we consider, and to attribute temporal as well as
eternal relations to them ; in other words, to regard
them not as essences but as things. But though
cognitive life begins with this attention to practical
exigences and is kindled by them, yet its ideal is
sacrificial ; it aspires to see each thing clearly and to
see all things together, that is to say, under the form
of eternity, and as sheer essences given in intuition.
To cease to live temporally is intellectually to be
saved ; it is (Wavari&iv, to fade or to brighten into
the truth, and to become eternal. It is the inmost
aim and highest achievement of cognition to cease
to be knowledge for a self, to abolish the bias and
transcend the point of view by which knowledge
establishes its perspectives, so that all things may be
present equally, and the truth may be all in all.

All this comes about, however, only subjectively,
in that vital and poetic effort of the mind to under
stand which begins with a candid self-forgetfulness
and ends in a passionate self -surrender. Seen from
outside, as it takes place psychologically, the matter
wears an entirely different aspect. In reality, essence
and the intuition of essence can never be identical.
If all animal predicaments were resolved, there would
be no organ and no occasion for intuition ; and
intuition ceasing, no essences would appear. Certainly
they would not be abolished by that accident in their
own sphere, and each would be what it would have
seemed if intuition of it had arisen ; but they would
all be merely logical or aesthetic themes unrehearsed,
as remote as possible from life or from the intense
splendour of divinity. Essence without intuition
would be not merely non-existent (as it always is), but
what is worse, it would be the object of no contempla
tion, the goal of no effort, the secret or implicit ideal

ESSENCE AND INTUITION 129

of no life. It would be valueless. All that joy and
sense of liberation which pure objectivity brings to
the mind would be entirely absent ; and essence
would lose all its dignity if life lost its precarious
existence.

I believe that Aristotle, and even more mystical
spokesmen of the spirit, would not have ignored this
circumstance if they had not taken so narrow a view
of essence. They see it only through some peep-hole
of morals, grammar, or physics ; the small part of
that infinite realm which thus becomes visible they
take for the whole ; or if they feel some uneasiness at
the obvious partiality of this survey, they rather blot
out and blur the part before them, lest it seem arbitrary,
instead of imagining it filled out with all the rest that,
in the realm of essence, cannot help surrounding it.
Even Spinoza, who so clearly defines the realm of
essence as an infinite number of kinds of being, each
having an infinite number of variations, calls this
infinity of being substance ; as if at once to weight
it all with existence (a horrible possibility) and to
obliterate its internal distinctions ; but distinction,
infinitely minute and indelible distinction of every
thing from everything else, is what essence means.
Yet people suppose that whatever is non-existent is
nothing — a stupid positivism, like that of saying that
the past is nothing, or the future nothing, or every
thing nothing of which I happen to be ignorant. If
people reflected that the non-existent, as Leibniz says,
is infinite, that it is everything, that it is the realm of
essence, they would be more cautious in regarding
essence as something selected, superior in itself, and
worthy of eternal contemplation. They would not
conceive it as the power or worth in things actual, but
rather as the form of everything and anything.

Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence
by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it,

K

1 30 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

as being the part relevant to his own life. If the
organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will
reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. This
intuition will be vital in the highest degree. It will
be absorbed in its object. It will be unmindful of any
possibility of lapse in that object, or defection on its
own part ; it will not be aware of itself, of time, or
of circumstances. But this intuition will continue to
exist, and to exist in time, and the pulsations of its
existence will hardly go on without some oscillation,
and probably a quick evanescence. So the intuition
will be an utterly different thing from the essence
intuited : it will be something existent and probably
momentary ; it will glow and fade ; it will be perhaps
delightful ; that is, no essences will appear to it which
are not suffused with a general tint of interest and
beauty. The life of the psyche, which rises to this
intuition, determines all the characters of the essence
evoked, and among them its moral quality. But as
pure intuition is life at its best, when there is least
rasping and thumping in its music, a prejudice or
presumption arises that any essence is beautiful and
life-enhancing. This platonic adoration of essence is
undeserved. The realm of essence is dead, and the
intuition of far the greater part of it would be deadly
to any living creature.

The contemplation of so much of essence as is
relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called
the entelechy or perfect fruition of that life. If the
cosmos were a single animal, as the ancients supposed,
and had an aim and a life which, like human life,
could be fulfilled in the contemplation of certain
essences, then a life like that of Aristotle's God would
be involved in the perfection of nature, if this per
fection was ever attained. Or if, with Aristotle, we
suppose that the cosmos has always been in perfect
equilibrium, then a happy intuition of all relevant

ESSENCE AND INTUITION 131

essence on the part of the cosmos would actually exist
and would be that sustained, ecstatic, divine life which
Aristotle speaks of. Yet even then the cosmic intuition
of essence would not be the essence it beheld. The
intuition would be a natural fact, by accident per
petual and necessarily selective ; because the cosmos
might stop turning at any moment, and certainly the
music of those spheres, even while they rolled well,
would not be every sort and any sort of noise, nor
even of music. A different cosmos would have had,
or might elsewhere be having, a different happiness.
Each, however, would be a divine life, as the ancients
conceived divinity. It would have such a natural
basis as any life must have, and the consequent warmth
and moral colour ; for natural operations lend these
values to the visions in which they rest. The love of
certain special essences which animates existence is
an expression of the direction which the movement
of existence happens to have. If the cosmos were a
perfect animal — and in its unknown secular pulsations
it may possibly be one — the cosmic intellect in act
would not be the whole of the realm of essence, nor
any part of it. It would be the intuition of so much
of essence as that cosmos had for its goal.

The external and naturalistic point of view from
which all this appears is one I have not yet justified
critically : I have anticipated it for the sake of render
ing the conception of essence perfectly unambiguous.
But if we start from the realm of essence, which
demands no belief, we may at once find conclusive
reasons for believing that sundry intuitions of parts
of it exist in fact. One reason is the selectiveness of
discourse. All essences are always at hand, ready to
be thought of, if any one has the wit to do so. But my
discourse takes something up first, and then, even if
it is purely dialectical, passes to some implication or
complement of that idea ; and it never exhausts its

1 32 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

themes. It traverses the realm of essence as, in a
mosque, some ray of light from some high aperture
might shoot across the sombre carpets : it is a brief,
narrow, shifting, oblique illumination of something
vast and rich. The fact that intuition has a direction
is an added proof of its existential character, and of
its complete diversity in nature from the essences it
lights up. Life begins unaccountably and moves
irreversably : when it is prosperous and intelligent,
it accumulates its experience of things in a personal
perspective, largely alien to the things themselves.
When the objects surveyed are essences, no one can
be prior to any other in their own sphere : they do
not arise at all, and lie in no order of precedence.
When one essence includes another as number two
includes number one, it is as easy and as proper to
reach one by dividing two as to reach two by repeating
one. In themselves essences have no genesis ; and
to repeat one would be impossible if duality were not
begged at the start, as well as unity, to institute the
possibility of repetition. In seizing upon any par
ticular essence first, discourse is guided by an irrational
fatality. Some chance bit is what first occurs to the
mind : I run up against this or that, for no logical
reason. This arbitrary assault of intuition upon
essence is evidence that something not essence, which
I call intuition, has come into play. Thus all dis
course, even if it traces ideal implications, is itself
contingent to them, and in its existence irrational.
Animal life is involved in the perusal of essence, just
as animal faith is involved in the trust I put in demon
stration. If I aspired to be a disembodied spirit, I
ought to envisage all essences equally and at once — a
monstrous requirement. If I aspire instead to dwell
in the presence only of the pertinent, the beautiful,
and the good, I confess that I am but a natural creature,
directed on a small circle of interests and perfections ;

ESSENCE AND INTUITION 133

and that my intuition in particular exercises an adven
titious choice, and has a private method, in its survey
of essence.

The first existence, then, of which a sceptic who
finds himself in the presence of random essences may
gather reasonable proof, is the existence of the intuition
to which those essences are manifest. This is of
course not the object which the animal mind first
posits and believes in. The existence of things is
assumed by animals in action and expectation before
intuition supplies any description of what the thing
is that confronts them in a certain quarter. But
animals are not sceptics, and a long experience must
intervene before the problem arises which I am here
considering, namely, whether anything need be posited
and believed in at all. And I reply that it is not
inevitable, if I am willing and able to look passively
on the essences that may happen to be given : but
that if I consider what they are, and how they appear,
I see that this appearance is an accident to them ;
that the principle of it is a contribution from my
side, which I call intuition. The difference between
essence and intuition, though men may have discovered
it late, then seems to me profound and certain. They
belong to two different realms of being.

CHAPTER XV

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE

I HAVE now agreed to believe that discourse is a con
tingent survey of essence, partial, recurrent, and
personal, with an arbitrary starting-point and an
arbitrary direction of progress. It picks up this
essence or that for no reason that it can assign. How
ever dialectical the structure of the theme considered
may be, so that its various parts seem to imply one
another, the fact that this theme rather than any
other is being considered is a brute fact : and my
discourse as a whole is a sheer accident, initiated, if
initiated at all, by some ambushed power, not only
in its existence, but in its duration, direction, and
scope.

Nevertheless this fatality does not raise any problem
in that discourse itself, because it occasions no surprise.
Problems are created after discourse is in full swing,
by contradictory presumptions or aching voids arising
within it. There are no problems in nature, and
none in the realm of essence. Existence — the most
inexplicable of surds — is itself no problem in its own
eyes : it takes itself blandly for granted, so long as it
is prosperous. This is a healthy dulness on its part,
because if there is no reason why a particular fact
should exist rather than any other, or none at all, there
is also no reason why it should not exist. The philo
sopher who has learned to make nature the standard

134

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE 135

of naturalness will not wonder at it. He will repeat
on a large scale that act of ready submission to fate
which every new - born intuition performs spon
taneously. It does not protest against its sudden
existence. It is not surprised at the undeserved
favour that has fallen to its share. It modestly and
wisely forgets itself and notes only the obvious,
profoundly self-justified essence which appears before
it. That this essence might just as well, or might
far better, have been replaced by some other is not
a suggestion to be possibly gathered from that essence
itself. Nor is the psyche (the ambushed power from
which the intuition actually comes) less self-satisfied*
and at peace. The psyche, too, takes her own idio
syncrasy for granted, singular and highly determinate
as this is, and extraordinarily censorious concerning
all other things. Her nature seems to her by right
everlasting, and that to which it is the obvious duty
of all other things to adjust themselves. God, too,
if we refer these agreeable fatalities ultimately to his
decrees, is conceived in like manner never to wonder
why he exists although evidently nothing could have
previously demanded his existence, or prepared the
way for it, or made it intelligible. Nevertheless the
mortal psyche perhaps thinks she sees the secret even
of that, because it was necessary that God should
exist in order to make her own existence perfectly
safe, legitimate, and happy for ever. This assurance
is needed, because there are unfortunately some cir
cumstances that might suggest the opposite.

Before turning to these circumstances, it may be
well to observe that actual discourse, as distinguished
from the internal dialectic of essences, may have any
degree of looseness ; that is, the terms which it takes
up in succession may have nothing to do with one
another essentially. There is no added paradox in
this : what is groundless and irrational in its inception

136 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

may well be groundless and irrational in its pro
cedure, and an appearance that has no reason for
arising has no reason for not yielding to any other
appearance, or to vacancy. And yet sometimes the
course of appearances does produce wonder and
discontent. How can this be ? If I am not sur
prised at beginning to exist, or at finding something
before me, since present being cannot contain any
presumption or contradiction against itself, so it would
seem that I should not be surprised at any changes
in existence, however radical and complete. Often,
indeed, I am not surprised, but follow the development
of discourse, as in a dream, with perfect acquiescence,
or even with a distinct premonition of what is coming,
and eagerness that it should come. If I were a pure
spirit, or even an open mind, this ought to be always
the case. However different essences may be, they
cannot in their own realm exclude or contradict one
another ; there, infinite diversity provokes no conflict
and imposes no alternatives, and the being of anything,
far from impeding that of other things, seems positively
to invite and to require it, somewhat as every part of
Euclidean space, far from denying the other parts,
implies them. Irrelevance is, as it were, mere distance ;
and there is nothing strange or evil in quickness of
thought, that should jump from one essence to another
altogether dissimilar to it, or even contrary.

And yet I cannot prolong or intensify discourse
without soon coming upon what I call interruption,
confusion, doubt, or contradiction. An impulse to
select, to pursue, and to reject specific essences in
sinuates itself into discourse. Why this animosity or
this impatience ? I do not disparage, nor subordinate,
nor remove the circle from the realm of essence, when
I think of the square and say it is no circle. Why
then should I be angry if I find the one rather than
the other ? Evidently my discourse here is not pure

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE 137

contemplation. Of course, no essence is any other
essence ; but a clear spirit would not call any two
essences incompatible. Their diversity is part of their
being ; they are because, each being eternally itself,
the two are eternally different. If they are in
compatible, I must ask : Incompatible for what
purpose ? Even in calling them contradictory, I am
surreptitiously speaking for some hidden interest,
which cannot put up with them both. There is an
inertia or prior direction somewhere, in the region of
what I call myself, that demands one of them, and
rejects the other for the innocent crime of not being
that one. The incongruous essence appearing offends
me because I am wedded to an old one, and to its
close relations. I will tolerate nothing but what I
meant should come, what fills my niche, and falls in
with my undertaking.

Irrelevance, incongruity, and contradiction are ac
cordingly possible in discourse only because discourse
is not a play of essences but a play of attention upon
them ; which attention is no impartial exercise of
spirit but a manifestation of interest, intent, preference,
and preoccupation. A hidden life is at work. If I
deny this, because my scepticism eschews everything
hidden, I must consistently abandon all dialectic and
revert to undirected dreaming, without comments on
my dream intended to be veridical : because if the
least comment on my dreams were veridical I must
begin at once to reject, in my comments, all the
essences suggesting themselves which deviate from
that particular dream I mean to describe. Meaning,
which is my guide in discriminating one suggestion
from another as being the right one, springs from
beneath the surface ; it is a nether influence. It is a
witness to my psychic life going on beneath, which
can be disturbed by the intrusion of one event, or
furthered by another ; and this subterranean impulse

138 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

breaks out into judgements about the Tightness and
wrongness of essences — utterly absurd and unmeaning
judgements if the essences were considered simply in
themselves. If I feel that they clash, if I make a
stumbling-block of their irrelevance or diversity, I
prove that I am discoursing about them for an ulterior
purpose, in the service of some alien interest. I am
stringing my pearls ; therefore I require them to be
of a particular quality. I am a collector, not a poet ;
and what concerns me, even in the purest dialectic
or the most desultory dream, is not to explore essence,
but to gather experience. The psyche below is busy
selecting her food, fortifying her cave, and discriminat
ing her friends from her enemies ; and in these
meanderings of mine over the realm of essence, in
spite of myself, I am only her scout.

By experience I understand a fund of wisdom
gathered by living. I call it a fund of wisdom, rather
than merely memory or discursive ideation, because
experience accrues precisely when discrimination
amongst given essences is keenest, when only the
relevant is retained or perhaps noticed, and when the
psyche sagaciously interprets data as omens favourable
or unfavourable to her interests, as perilous or inviting,
and, if she goes wrong, allows the event to correct
her interpretation. I think it mere mockery to use
the word experience for what is not learning or gather
ing knowledge of facts ; if experience taught me
nothing it would not be experience, but reverie.
Experience accordingly presupposes intent and in
telligence, and it also implies, as will appear presently,
a natural world in which it is possible to learn to live
better by practising the arts.

Intuition is an event, although it reveals only an
essence ; and in like manner discourse is an experience,
even when its deliverance is mere dialectic. It is an
experience for two reasons : first, because it is guided

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE 139

unawares by the efforts of the psyche to explore, not
the realm of essence, but the world that controls her
fortunes ; and secondly, because the essences un
rolled before it, apparently at random and for no reason,
really convey knowledge ; in reality they are mani
festations to the psyche of that surrounding world
which it concerns her to react upon wisely. Discourse
is hers ; and it is full of the names — since images not
auditory may be names also — which she gives to her
friends and enemies, and of her ingenious imagina
tions concerning their ways. However original the
terms of discourse may be, under the control of the
psyche and her environment they fall into certain
rhythms ; they run into familiar sequences ; they
become virtual and available knowledge of things,
persons, nature, and the gods. Imagination would be
very insecure and inconstant in these constructions, and
they would not become automatic habits in discourse,
if instinct within and nature without did not control
the process of discourse, and dictate its occasions. So
controlled, discourse becomes experience.

That discourse is secretly an experience, and may
be turned into knowledge, becomes particularly evident
when it is interrupted by shocks. Not only may an
essence suddenly present itself which was not the
essence I expected or should have welcomed, but the
whole placid tenor of my thoughts may be arrested
or overwhelmed. I may suffer a sort of momentary
and conscious death, in that I survive to feel the
extinction of all that made up my universe, and to
face a blank, or a precipice. When in my placid
discourse one thing seemed to contradict another,
they were but rival images in the same field, and I
had but to choose between them, and proceed with
the argument. Shock contradicts nothing, but up
roots the whole experience. The lights go out on
the stage, and discourse loses its momentum.

140 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

In the sense of contradiction there is probably
some element of shock. The purest aesthetic or
logical contemplation hardly goes on without a throb
bing accompaniment of interest, haste, reversals,
and satisfactions ; but these dramatic notes are merged
in the counterpoint of the themes surveyed, and I
think, prove, and enjoy without noticing that I do so.
But when a clap of thunder deafens me, or a flash of
lightning at once dazzles and blinds me, the fact that
something has happened is far more obvious to me
than just what it is that has occurred ; and there are
perhaps shocks internal to the psyche in which the
tension of the event reaches a maximum, whilst the
nature of it remains so obscure that perhaps my only
sense of it is a question, a gasp, or a recoil. The
feeling present in such a case is, with but little further
qualification, the sheer feeling of experience.

Now experience of the most brutal and dumbest
sort may be theoretically described, and described
exhaustively, in terms of the successive intuition of
essences ; for loudness, dazzlingness, pain, or terror
are essences or elements of essences like any other
data ; and when such essences are present, all is
present that it is possible ever to feel in that direction,
and with any degree of intensity. Utter blankness,
intolerable strain, shrieking despair, are just the
essences they are, and they are unrolled and revealed
to intuition like any other essences. But such in
tuitions, being those proper to the most brutal and
rudimentary life, have a suasion in them out of all
proportion to their articulation, or rather, we might
almost say, inversely proportional to it ; as if the more
an experience meant the less it cried out, and the more
it cried out the less it meant. The purest discourse
is (without noticing it) an experience, and the blindest
experience (also without noticing it) is a discourse,
since we should not call it experience if it contained

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE 141

no sense of passage, no experiential perspective ; but
in proportion as shock cancels discourse and obliter
ates its own background, experience becomes mere
experience, and inarticulate.

In brute experience, or shock, I have not only a
clear indication, for my ulterior reflection, that I
exist, but a most imperious summons at that very
moment to believe in my existence. Discourse, as I
first disentangled the evidence for it from the pure
intuition of essence, seemed to be a progressive
observation of the permanent — studious attention
perusing and registering the essential mutual relations
of given terms. But now, when shock interrupts me,
discourse suffers violence. The subject-matter itself
takes up arms ; one object leaves me in the lurch,
while another, quite irrelevantly, assaults me. And
since my discourse witnesses and records this revolu
tion, I must now assert it to be a permanent knowledge
of the changing.

Shocks come : if they did not come, if I had not
pre-existed, if I had never been anything more than
the intuition of this shock, then this shock would not
be a shock in fact, but only the illusion of a shock,
only the essence of shock speciously persuading me
that something had happened, when in fact nothing
had occurred. If the sense of shock does not deceive
me, I must have passed from a state in which the
shock was not yet, into the state in which the shock
first startled me ; and I must since have passed from
that startled state into another, in which my intuition
covers synthetically the coming, the nature, and the
subsidence of that shock ; so that I am aware how
startled I was, without being startled afresh now. A
wonderful and ambiguous presence of the absent and
persistence of the receding, which is called memory.
My objects have receded, yet I continue to consider
them. They are no longer essences, but facts, and

142 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

my consideration is not intuition of something given
but faith in something absent, and a persistent indica
tion of it as still the same object, although my image
of it is constantly changing, is perhaps intermittent,
and probably grows fainter, vaguer, and more erroneous
at every instant.

Experience of shock, if not utterly delusive, ac
cordingly establishes the validity of memory and of
transitive knowledge. It establishes realism. If it be
true that I have ever had any experience, I must not
only have existed unawares in order to gather it, but
I am justified in explicitly asserting a whole realm of
existence, in which one event may contain realistic
knowledge of another. Experience, even conceived
most critically as a series of shocks overtaking one
another and retained in memory, involves a world of
independent existences deployed in an existing medium.
Belief in experience is belief in nature, however
vaguely nature may as yet be conceived, and every
empiricist is a naturalist in principle, however hesitant
his naturalism may be in practice.

Nevertheless shock, like any other datum, in
trinsically presents an essence only, and might be
nothing more ; but in that case the dogmatic suasion
of it (which alone lends interest to so blank an ex
perience) would be an illusion. The intuition would
be what it is, but it would be nobody's intuition, and
it would mean nothing. For I should not be a self,
if that intuition made up my whole being, so that it
involved no change in my condition, but was perhaps
itself the whole universe. Shock will not suffer me,
while it lasts, to entertain any such hypothesis. It is
itself the most positive, if the blindest, of beliefs ; it
loudly proclaims an event ; so that if by chance the
change which I feel were merely a feeling within the
unity of apperception, shock would be an illusion, in
the only sense in which this can be said of any intuition :

BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE 143

it would incite me to a false belief that something
like the given essence existed. If the change has really
occurred, and not merely been imagined, shock is not
only intuition of change, but trouble in a process of
change enveloping that intuition. I am right in
positing a desultory experience in which this intuition
is an incident. I am not a spectator watching this
cataract, but a part of the water precipitated over the
edge. Thus if being shocked was, as perhaps it
ought to be, the first sensation in life, it proclaimed
the existence of a previous state without sensation.
Unless it is an illusion, which I cannot admit while I
feel it, it implies variation in a voluminous vegetative
life in which the sense of surprise is a true indication
of novelty.

Before I had noticed shock, or consented to accept
its witness, I had already admitted, on dialectical
grounds, that discourse was a process ; but now that
I observe how shocks, more or less violent, interrupt
discourse at every moment, I can call discourse ex
perience. For now I see that in endeavouring to
trace dialectical relations discourse is not itself dia
lectical. Sheer chance decides whether it shall pursue
faithfully the theme it may have picked out, as sheer
chance decided that it should pick up that theme in
particular. In my theoretical bewilderment and help
lessness before this absolute contingency of all themes
and all data, I am steadied only by animal presump
tions, habits, expectations, or omens, all of which
my sceptical reflection must condemn as utterly
arbitrary. I can only say that I am the sport of an
unfathomable destiny ; that in these shocks that fall
upon me thick and fast, and in the calmer stretches
between them, miscellaneous essences are revealed to
me, most of them gratuitous and mutually irrelevant ;
and that if the current of them did not carry me,
somewhat congenially, into a vortex of work and play,

i44 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

I should be condemned for ever to blank watching
and to sheer wonder. The very belief in experience
is a suggestion of instinct, not of experience itself.
The steadfastness of my nature, doggedly retaining
its prejudices and assuming its power, supplies and
imposes a routine upon my experience which is far
from existing in my direct intuitions, very shifty in
their quality (even when signs of the same external
object) and much mixed with dream. Even the
naturalist has to make up by analogy and presumption
(which perhaps he calls induction) the enormous
spaces between and beyond his actual observations.

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold
instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most
animals, by which man has raised himself to his
earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him,
both within him and without, and enables him to
transmute his apprehension, at first merely aesthetic,
into mathematical science. This is so great a step
that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and
remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.
Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their
roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially
welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom
in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial,
and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition,
not having the courage to believe in experience.

CHAPTER XVI

BELIEF IN THE SELF

EXPERIENCE, when the shocks that punctuate it are
reacted upon instinctively, imposes belief in some
thing far more recondite than mental discourse, namely,
a person or self ; and not merely such a trans
cendental ego as is requisite intrinsically for any
intuition, nor such a flux of sentience as discourse itself
constitutes, but a substantial being preceding all the
vicissitudes of experience, and serving as an instru
ment to produce them, or a soil out of which they
grow.

Shock is the great argument of common sense for
the existence of material things, because common
sense does not need to distinguish the order of evidence
from the order of genesis. If I know already that a
tile has fallen on my head, my sore head is a proof
to me that the tile was real ; but if I start from the
pain itself in all innocence, I cannot draw any inference
from it about tiles or the laws of gravity. By common
sense experience is conceived as the effect which the
impact of external things makes on a man when he
is able to retain and remember it. As a matter of
fact, of course, shocks usually have an external origin,
although in dreams, madness, apparitions, and in
disease generally, their cause is sometimes internal.
But all question concerning the source of a shock is
vain for the sceptic ; he knows nothing of sources ;

146 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

he is asking, not whence shocks come, but to what
beliefs they should lead. In the criticism of know
ledge the argumentum baculaneum is accordingly ridi
culous, and fit only for the backs of those who use it.
Why, if I am a spirit beholding essences, should
I not feel shocks ? Why are not novelties and
surprises as likely themes for my entertainment as the
analysis or synthesis of some theorem or of some
picture ? All essences are grist for the mill of intuition,
and any order or disorder, any quality of noise or
violence, is equally appropriate in an experience which,
for all I know or as yet believe, is absolute and ground
less. And I call it experience, not because it discloses
anything about the environment which produced it,
but because it is composed of a series of shocks, which
I survey and remember.

If, however, consenting to listen to the voice of
nature, I ask myself what a shock can signify, and of
what it brings me most unequivocal evidence, the least
hazardous answer will be : evidence of preposses
sions on my part. What shock proves, if it proves
anything, is that I have a nature to which all events
and all developments are not equally welcome. How
could any apparition surprise or alarm me, or how
could interruption of any sort overtake me, unless I
was somehow running on in a certain direction, with
a specific rhythm ? Had I not such a positive nature,
the existence of material things and their most violent
impact upon one another, shattering the world to
atoms, would leave me a placid observer of their
movement ; whereas a definite nature in me, even
if disturbed only by cross-currents or by absolute
accidents within my own being, would justify my
sense of surprise and horror. A self, then, not a
material world, is the first object which I should posit
if I wish the experience of shock to enlarge my dogmas
in the strict order of evidence.

BELIEF IN THE SELF 147

But what sort of a self ? In one sense, the existence
of intuition is tantamount to that of a self, though of
a merely formal and transparent one, pure spirit. A
self somewhat more concrete is involved in discourse,
when intuition has been deployed into a successive
survey of constant ideal objects, since here the self
not only sees, but adds an adventitious order to the
themes it rehearses ; traversing them in various
directions, with varying completeness, and suspending
or picking up the consideration of them at will ; so
that the self involved in discourse is a thinking mind.
Now that I am consenting to build further dogmas on
the sentiment of shock, and to treat it, not as an essence
groundlessly revealed to me, but as signifying some
thing pertinent to the alarm or surprise with which it
fills me, I must thicken and substantialise the self I
believe in, recognising in it a nature that accepts or
rejects events, a nature having a movement of its own,
far deeper, more continuous and more biassed than
a discoursing mind : the self posited by the sense of
shock is a living psyche.

This is a most obscure subterraneous object ; I am
venturing into the nether world. It is alarming and
yet salutary to notice how near to radical scepticism
are the gates of Hades. I shall have occasion later to
consider what the psyche is physically, when I have
learned more about the world in which she figures ;
she has some stake in it, since she welcomes or strives
against sundry events. So anxious a being must have
but precarious conditions of existence, and yet some
native adaptation to them, since she manages to exist
at all. Here I need admit only this : that the pure
spirit involved in any intuition of essence is in my
case repeatedly and somewhat consecutively actualised
in a running mental discourse ; that, further, it is
employed in remembering, loving, and hating, so that
it almost seems to spring like a wild beast upon its

148 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

visions, as upon its prey, and to gnaw and digest them
into its own substance. Spirit, as I shall soon find, is
no substance, and has no interests ; all this absurd
animal violence may still be nothing but a dream ;
and the fact, now agreed upon, that discourse is going
on, may suffice to dispose of these passionate move
ments. Music, which is ethereal in its being and, in
the objective direction, terminates in pure essence,
nevertheless in its play with pure essence is full of
trepidation, haste, terror, potentiality, and sweetness.
If mere sound can carry such a load, why should not
discourse do likewise, in which images of many other
sorts come trooping across the field of intuition ?
This is no idle doubt, since the whole Buddhist system
is built on accepting it as a dogma ; and transcendental
ism, though it talks much of the self, denies, or ought
to deny, its existence, and the existence of anything ;
the transcendental self is pure spirit, incoherently
identified with the principle of change, preference, and
destiny which this philosophy calls Will, but which
in truth, as I shall find, is matter. The Buddhists
too, in denying the self, are obliged to introduce an
ambiguous equivalent in the heritage of guilt, ignorance,
and illusion which they call Karma. These are
ulterior mystifications, which I mention here only lest
I should proceed to posit the natural psyche without
a due sense of the risks I am taking. The natural
psyche, being a habit of matter, is to be described
and investigated from without, scientifically, by a be
haviourist psychology ; but the critical approach to it
from within, as a postulate of animal faith, is extremely
difficult and fraught with danger. Literary psychology,
to which I am here confined, is at home only in the
sentiments and ideas of the adult mind, as language

' O O

has expressed them : the deeper it tries to go, the
vaguer its notions ; and it soon loses itself in the dark
altogether. I cannot hope to discover, therefore, what

BELIEF IN THE SELF 149

precisely this psyche is, this self of mine, the existence
of which is so indubitable to my active and passionate
nature. The evidence for it in shock hardly goes
beyond the instinctive assertion that I existed before,
that I am a principle of steady life, welcoming or
rejecting events, that I am a nucleus of active interests
and passions. It will be easy to graft upon these
passions and interests the mental discourse which I
had previously asserted to be going on, and which
made up, in this critical reconstruction of belief, my
first notion of myself. And yet here is one of the
dangers of my investigation, because mental discourse
is not, and cannot be, a self nor a psyche. It is all
surface ; it neither precedes, nor survives, nor guides,
nor posits its data ; it merely notes and remembers
them. Discourse is a most superficial function of
the self ; and if by the self I was tempted to under
stand a series of ideas, I should be merely reverting
sceptically to that stage of philosophic denudation in
which I found myself, before I had consented to accept
the evidence of shock in favour of my own existence.
I, if I exist, am not an idea, nor am I the fact that
several ideas may exist, one of which remembers the
other. If I exist, I am a living creature to whom
ideas are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky ; they
pass over, more or less followed by the eye, more or
less listened to, recognised, or remembered ; but the
self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious natural
organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities ; so
that different events will awake it to quite dispropor
tionate activities. The self is a fountain of joy, folly,
and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dream
ing creature, in the midst of a vast natural world,
of which it catches but a few transient and odd
perspectives.

CHAPTER XVII

THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY

BELIEF in memory is implicit in the very rudiments of
mind ; mind and memory are indeed names for almost
the same thing, since memory furnishes most of the
resources of a mind at all developed, and nothing is
ever in the mind but may reappear in memory, if the
psyche can fall again for a moment into her old paces.
Mind and memory alike imply cognisance taken of
outlying things, or knowledge. When the things
known are events within the past experience of the
psyche, spontaneously imagined, knowledge is called
memory ; it is called mind or intelligence when they
are past, present, or future events in the environment
at large, no matter by what means they are suggested
or reported. Memory itself must report facts or
events in the natural world, if it is to be knowledge
and to deserve the name of memory. An intuition by
chance repeating an intuition that had occurred earlier
would not be memory or knowledge of that earlier
event. There must be belief in its previous occurrence,
with some indication of its original locus.

Intuition without memory must be assumed to
have existed in the beginning, but such intuition
regards essence only. Not being directed by memory
upon the past, nor by animal faith upon the future
or upon external things, pure intuition exercises no
sagacity, no transitive intelligence, and does not think.

150

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 151

It is merely the light of awareness lending actuality
to some essence. When identity and duration come
to be attributed to this essence, memory begins to
make its claims felt, although indirectly. When I call
an essence identical I imply that I have considered it
twice, and that I possess a true memory of my past
intuition, since I know it presented this very essence.
Similarly, when I call an essence the same, but without
distinguishing my two intuitions of it, which may be
continuous, I posit the truth of memory unawares ;
for this sensation of living on, of having lived up to
the present, is a primary memory. It sets up a
temporal perspective, believing firmly in its recessional
character ; parts of the specious present are inter
preted as survivals of a receding present, a present
that can never return, but the vision of which I have
not wholly lost. The perspective is not taken to
be specious only, but a true memorial of facts past
and gone.

Memory deploys all the items of its inventory at
some distance, yet sees them directly, by a present
glance. It makes no difference to the directness of
this knowledge how great the distance of the object
may be in the direction of the past. So also in fore
sight : I foresee my death as directly as I do my dinner,
not necessarily more vaguely, and far more certainly.
Memory and prophecy do in time what perception
does in space ; here too the given essence is projected
upon an object remote from the living psyche which
is the organ of the intuition and of the projection.
The object is indeed not remote from the mind, if by
mind I understand the intellectual energy of memory,
prophecy, or perception reaching to that object, and
positing it there in intent ; but it is remote from the
psyche, from the material agent, from me here and
now. A little less or a little more interval of time
or space — and there is always an interval — does not

152 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

render less ocular and immediate the description of
a removed event by the essences it brings before me.
I see a peewit in the sky as directly as I see the watch
in my hand, and I hear his note as easily as I do the
ticking of the watch against my ear. So I remember
the Scotch kilt I wore when a child as directly as the
umbrella I carried this morning. The difficulty in
extending the range of knowledge is physical only ;
I may be near-sighted ; and the mechanism of memory
may break down, or may be choked with parasitic
fancies as it grows old.

In memory it is sometimes possible to reproduce
almost exactly some earlier scene or experience. If
the psyche happens to run through the same process
twice — and being material she is compacted of habits
—she will twice have exactly the same intuition ; but
this precise repetition of the past, far from constituting
a perfect memory, excludes memory. The sentiment
of pastness, the receding perspective in which memory
places its data, will be wanting ; and this perfect
recovery of experience will not be remembrance. Nor
is any fulness or precision in the image of the past
necessary to the truth of memory. The nerve of
recollection lies elsewhere, in the projection of the
given essence — which may be vague or purely verbal—
to a precise point or nucleus of relations in the natural
past. Memory is genuine if the events it designates
actually took place, and conformed to the description,
however brief and abstract, which I give of them.
Pictorial fulness and emotional reversion to the past
are not important, and they are found most often at
unimportant points. Healthy memory excludes them,
and for two reasons. The bodily reaction to the old
environment is now hardly possible, and certainly
not appropriate ; and therefore, even if the neurogram
in the psyche could spring again into perfect life, it
would bring a dream into being, an interruption to

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 153

life in the present, rather than a sober memory rilling
the present appropriately with a long perspective.
The second reason is that the neurogram is likely to
have been modified by the accidents of nutrition and
waste intervening, so that the old movement cannot
really be repeated, and the essence called up will not
really be the original one. That it may seem to be
the original, in its very life, is nothing to the purpose.
How, if vivid, should it not seem so, when no other
memory exists to control it ? But if I can control it
by circumstantial evidence, I usually find that this
specious recovery of past experience is a cheap illusion.
If the reversion to the past seems complete, it is not
because the facts are remembered accurately, but
because some subtle influence fills me with a sentiment
wholly foreign to my present circumstances, and
redolent of a remote past ; and that dramatic shift
seems to lift all the details of the picture out of the
perspective of memory into the foreground of the
present. It is the fancy that comes forward, producing
a waking dream, not the memory that sinks back into
an old experience. The scent of a cedar chest in
which old finery is kept may carry me back vividly
to my earliest childhood ; but the images that now
seem to live again will be creatures of my present
sophisticated and literary fancy ; I shall see them
romantically, not with the eyes of a child. I may
truly recover knowledge of long-forgotten facts, but
I shall not re-enact a long-past experience. And
what need is there ? A miraculous identity may be
felt emotionally even when the two descriptions of the
identical thing differ in every sensible term, as happens
in metaphors, in myths, in myself as body and as
mind, in idolatry, or in the doctrine — which expresses
a mystical experience — of transubstantiation. In such
cases the vital reaction, the deeper readjustment of
the psyche, to the two appearances is the same ;

154 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

therefore I feel that the thing appearing in the two
ways is identical, that the one is really the other,
however diverse the two sets of symbols may be.

I have already accepted the belief in memory ;
indeed, without accepting it I could not have taken the
first step forward from the most speechless scepticism.
But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and
asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause
to consider somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive
claims of memory are, on which all human beliefs
are reared.

The paradox of knowing the absent is posited in
the past tenses of the verb ; it is the paradox of
knowledge itself, since intuition of essence is not
properly called knowledge ; it is imagination, since
the only object present is then non-existent and the
description of it, being creative, is infallible. The
claim to knowledge everybody understands perfectly
when he makes it, which he does whenever he perceives,
remembers, or believes anything ; but if we wish to
paraphrase this claim reflectively, we may perhaps
say that in it attention professes to fall on an object
explicitly at a distance, being framed by other nearer
objects (though at some distance themselves) upon
which attention falls only virtually. If this foreground
or frame were absent altogether, I should live in the
pictured past thinking it present ; memory would
overleap its memorial office and become a dream. It
would cease to be liable to error, being no longer a
report about anything else ; but it would become an
idle entertainment, which a moralist might call an
illusion, on the ground that its images were irrelevant
to the practice of rational life, and its emotions wasted.
But it would not misrepresent anything, since in
ceasing to be a memory it would have abandoned all
cognitive claims.

A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 155

to the projection which renders a present image a
vision of some past fact : I must stand here to point
there. Yet if my present station were explicitly
perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed
equally in thought, the picture would seem flat and
the perspective merely painted upon it, as upon a
cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy
the claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to
remember that I am remembering ; for then I should
be considering myself only, and only the present,
whereas in living remembrance I am self- forgetful,
and live in the present thinking only of the past, and
observe the past without supposing that I am living
in it. My recollections, my souvenirs, are only essences
which I read as I should the characters on this page,
not viewing them contemplatively in their own category
as forms present in their entirety, but accepting them
readily (as in all knowledge) as messengers, as signs
for existences of which they furnish but an imperfect
description, for which I am perhaps hopeful of sub
stituting a better view. In lapsing into the past I
seem to myself to be entering a realm of shadows ;
and a chief part of my wakefulness, which prevents me
from actually dreaming that I am living in that other
world, is precisely this eagerness of mine to see better,
to remember all, to recover the past as it really was ;
and the elusive and treacherous character of such
images as come to me troubles me seriously, as a
mist distorting and shutting off the truth. My heart,
as it were, is fixed on that removed reality, and I know
that my eyes see it but imperfectly. Yet if my heart
had intuition now of what that reality once was,
recollection would be superfluous, since I should
possess all it could bring me before it brought it ;
and on the other hand, if my heart did not know the
reality, how could I reject, criticise, or approve the
images that professed to restore its forgotten aspects ?

156 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Obviously what I am calling the heart, which is the
psyche, is blind in herself : imagination is her only
light, her only language ; but she is a prior principle
of choice and judgement and action in the dark ; so
that when the light shines in that darkness, she
comprehends it, and feels at once whether the ray
falls on the object towards which she was groping, or
on some irrelevant thing. The psyche, in the case
of memory, contains all the seeds, all the involutions
and latent habits, which the past left there in passing ;
any one of these may be released freely, or only
irritated and summoned to activity without being
sufficiently fed, or only to be at once thwarted and
contradicted ; and the sentiment of this prosperous or
mutilated rendering of experience, when memory
proffers its images, enables the psyche to judge these
images to be true or false, adequate or inadequate,
without possessing any other images with which to
compare them.

This felt imperfection of memory is no obstacle to
the directness of such knowledge as it does afford.
Memory, however vague, transports me to the intended
scene ; I walk by its wavering light through those
ancient chambers ; I see again (incorrectly, no doubt)
what occurred there. But if many a detail once
obvious is thereby lost or misplaced, memory may see
the chief features of the past in a truer perspective
than that in which experience placed them originally.
The ghostliness of memory carries this compensation
with it, comparable to the breadth of sympathy that
compensates old age for the loss of vivaciousness ;
memory is a reconstruction, not a relapse. The view
which the opened chest creates in me now of my
family history may be truer than any I had when a
child. My perceptions when a child were themselves
descriptions, naive, disjointed, limited. In reproduc
ing my past perceptions, my dreaming memory does

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 157

not regard those perceptions — perceptions being
spiritual facts, can become objects of intent only.
Memory regards the same objects (essences or things)
which the past perceptions regarded. But the soil
in which these intuitions now grow has been tilled
and watered, and, even if a little exhausted, it may
yield a fairer description of those ancient incidents
than existed before, more voluminous, better knit,
more knowing. Memory has fundamentally the same
function as history and science — to review things
more intelligently than they were ever viewed. Mind
would never rise out of the most helpless animal
routine if it could not forget in remembering, and
could not substitute a moral perspective for the
infinite flatness of physical experience. That much
drops out is a blessing ; that something creeps in, by
way of idealisation, hyperbole, and legend, is not an
unmixed evil. In spite of this admixture of fiction,
memory, legend, and science achieve a true intellectual
dominion over the flux of events ; and they add a
poetic life and rhythm of their own, like the senses.

This possibility of dominion proves that the images
and the apperception involved in remembering are
fresh images and a fresh apperception. It shows also
that the later station in time of the act of remembering
in no way annuls the directness of the knowledge
involved, nor cuts it off from its object ; on the
contrary, the object being posited and chosen by the
psyche before any images or any apperception arise,
these are free to describe that object in any way
they can, bringing all later resources of the mind to
illustrate it, and thereby perhaps describing it far
more truly than the senses revealed it when it was
present.

Here an important detail has come into view which
at first sight might seem paradoxical, but only because
the paucity of language obliges us often to use the

158 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

same word for very different things. Thus it seems
natural to say that a man may remember his own
experience, and can remember nothing else ; and yet
it is not his experience that he commonly remembers
at all, but the usual object of his memory is the object
of his former experience, the events or the situation
in which his earlier experience occurred. Experience
is intuition, it is discourse interspersed with shocks
and recapitulated ; but intuition, actual experience,
is not an object of any possible intuition or experi
ence, being, as I have said above, a spiritual fact. Its
existence can be discovered only by moral imagination,
and posited dramatically, as the experience proper to
spirit under certain real or imaginary circumstances.
And this is true of my own past or future, no less than
of the experience of others. When I remember I do
not look at my past experience, any more than when
I think of a friend's misfortunes I look at his thoughts.
I imagine them ; or rather I imagine something of my
own manufacture, as if I were writing a novel, and I
attribute this intuited experience to myself in the past,
or to the other person. Naturally, I can impute only
such feelings as my present psyche can evoke ; and
she, although creative, creates automatically and in
accordance with patterns fixed by habit or instinct ;
so that it is true, in a loose way, that I can remember
or conceive only what I have experienced ; but this
is not because my experience itself remains within me,
and can be re-observed. Such a notion needs but to
be made clear to be made ridiculous. Living intuition
cannot be preserved ; and even while it lives, it cannot
be found. It is spiritual.

Recollection is accordingly incipient dreaming ; it
views the same objects as the experience did which
it rehearses, since the memory arises by a renewal of
the very process in the psyche by which that experience
was created originally. The psyche, in so far as she

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 159

is occupied with that dream, does not know that it is
a memory, nor that its objects are remote and perhaps
no longer exist ; she posits them with all the con
fidence of action, as in any other dream. Yet in
normal memory the illusion is controlled and corrected,
and the experience actually given, with all its posited
objects, is relegated to the past ; because this time it
is framed in another experience, with more obstinate
objects and an environment to which the body is
adjusted, incompatible with the remembered environ
ment. Hence the shadowy, vaporous, unreal aspect
of the remembered past : images chase one another
through it, as they chase one another sometimes in a
cinema, or as in a dream what was just now a white-
capped wave may become a horse galloping. Mean
time reason rides the storm of seething incipient
fancies, anchored in the outer senses by the steady
pull of the instincts which bind it to the present
world.

Experience cannot be remembered, a perception
cannot be perceived nor re-perceived. This fact
explains both the directness of memory (since it
regards the same objects, the same environment, as
the old experience, and repeats the same emotions),
and also the ghostliness of memory and of all ima
gination (since the beliefs and emotions evoked are
irrelevant to the present world, and inhibited by
peremptory present reactions).

There is a great difference conventionally between
memory and fancy, between history and fiction, and
the two things diverge widely in their physical sig
nificance, one regarding events in nature and the other
imaginary scenes ; nevertheless psychologically they
are clearly akin. It is only by an ulterior control that
we can distinguish which sort of fancy is memory and
which sort of fiction is historical. This control, for
the immediate past, is exercised by habit and sensation.

160 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

The immediate past is continuous with the present ;
I believe that I remember, and do not merely imagine,
the street in which I live, because I am ready to walk
out into it confidently, and by raising my eyes can see
it out of the window. It is an object continuous with
the recurrent objects of my present faith. When the
past is more remote, this control, while the same in
principle, is less directly exercised ; it is mainly the
habit of memory that testifies to the truth of memory.
I believe I remember, and do not merely imagine,
what I have always said I remembered ; just as we
believe events to be historical and not invented, when
historians have always repeated them. It is con
sequently very easy for a fiction, once incorporated in
what, because of our practical habits, we regard as
real events, to pass for a fact for ever. Autobiographies
and religions (even when not systematically recast by
the fancy, as they usually are) contain many such
involuntary confusions. Vice versa, a lively fiction
spontaneously takes the form of a history or a memory.
Although no junction with genuine memory or history
may be attempted in Robinson Crusoe at the beginning
or at the end, many a real fact may be woven into the
narrative, to add to its verisimilitude, and absorb, as
it were, the fancied details into the romantic medley
of things commonly believed. " Once upon a time,"
says the story - teller, in order vaguely to graft his
imaginary events on to the tree of memory ; and in
the Thousand and One Nights we are transported to
one of the cities amongst cities, or to an island amongst
the isles of the sea ; whereby the fiction grows more
arresting, or the real world more marvellous and
large.

Criticism of memory and history is a ticklish and
often a comic matter, because only fancy can be
employed to do it ; and we judge the authority of
records and the reports of our past experience by the

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 161

criterion of what, at the present moment, can exercise
a decided suasion over our belief, and create a living
illusion. But the principle by which we trust memory
at all is always the same, and deeply paradoxical.
How can a flux be observed at all ? If flux there be,
the earlier part is gone when the latter part appears :
how then can the relation, the passage, be observed ?
And where is the observation ? If it occupies each
instant in turn, how can it bridge them ? If it stands
outside, how can it touch any of them ? In any case
the observation would seem to be out of the flux
which it imagines, but does not undergo : for if its
being is instantaneous, there is no flux in it ; and if
it is comprehensive, and contemporary with all the
instants surveyed, again it endures no change. Indeed,
analytically, it is obvious that a sense of change, falling
necessarily under a unity of apperception, transcends
that change, however changeful may be the conditions
of its own genesis : mind, by its very character as
mind, is timeless. Is time, then, merely a picture
of time, and can it be nothing else ? And is flux,
which is an essential quality of existence, only a mere
appearance, and essentially incapable of existing in
fact ?

There is danger here of an enormous illusion, into
which I think the most redoubtable metaphysicians
have fallen. We must admit that spirit is not in time,
that the perception of flux (or of anything else) is not
a flux, but a synthetic glance and a single intuition of
relation, of form, of quality. The seen is everywhere
a universal, the seeing is everywhere supernatural.
But this admission is far from involving a denial of
flux — a denial, that is, of the deliverance of this very
spirit to which we are assigning such pompous pre
rogatives. The one prerogative which we must assume
spirit to possess — because we claim it in exercising
spirit at all — is that it understands, that it tells truly

M

1 62 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

something about something. Its own conditions of
being, that it must be immaterial, timeless, synthetic,
intuitive, do not preclude it, if it is truly intelligent,
from revealing things differently constituted from
itself : much less can it prevent these non-spiritual
things from existing. What madness is this, because
we may at last discern the spirituality of spirit, to deny
that there could ever have been anything for spirit to
discern ? Why stultify the very faculty we are dis
covering that we possess ? Why tumble in this way
head over heels from our little eminence, and reduce
ourselves to speechlessness in wonder at our capacity
to speak ? This supernatural status and super-
temporal scope of spirit are not prerogatives ; they
are deprivations ; they are sacrificial conditions, from
the point of view of natural existence, to which any
faculty must submit, if it is to understand. Of course
understanding is itself an achievement (though not all
philosophers esteem it highly), but it must be bought
at a price : at the price of escaping into a fourth
dimension, of not being that which we understand.
So when the flux, in its rumble and perpetual super
position of movements, remembers that it flows, it is
not arrested materially ; but the sense that what flows
through it at this instant has come from afar, that it
has taken a fresh shape, and is hurrying to new trans
formations, has itself eluded that fate : for this sense,
as distinguished from the psyche that exercises it, is
tangential to the flux it surveys, neither instantaneous
nor prolonged, but simply intelligent. How far into
the past or future its glance may reach, is a matter of
accident, and of the range of adjustments at that
moment in the psyche. But spirit is virtually
omniscient : barriers of space and time do not shut
it in ; they are but the boundary-stones of field and
field in its landscape. It is ready to survey all time
and all existence if, by establishing some electric

COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY 163

connection with its seat, time and existence will
consent to report themselves to it. For spirit has
no interests, no curiosity, no animal impatience ; and
as it arises only when and where nature calls it forth,
so it surveys only what nature happens to spread
before it.

CHAPTER XVIII

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS

IN the claims of memory I have a typical instance of
what is called knowledge. In remembering I believe
that I am taking cognisance not of a given essence but
of a remote existence, so that, being myself here and
now, I can consider and describe something going
on at another place and time. This leap, which
renders knowledge essentially faith, may come to
seem paradoxical or impossible like the leap of physical
being from place to place or from form to form which
is called motion or change, and which some philosophers
deny, as they deny knowledge. Is there such a leap
in knowing ? Am I really here and now when I
apprehend some remote thing ? Certainly, if by
myself I understand the psyche within my body,
which directs my outer organs, reacts on external
things, and shapes the history and character of the
individual animal that bears my name. In this sense
I am a physical being in the midst of nature, and my
knowledge is a name for the effects which surrounding
things have upon me, in so far as I am quickened by
them, and readjusted to them. I am certainly confined
at each moment to a limited space and time, but may
be quickened by the influence of things at any distance,
and may be readjusting myself to them. For the
naturalist there is accordingly no paradox in the leap

164

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 165

of knowledge other than the general marvel of material
interaction and animal life.

If by myself, however, I meant pure spirit, or
the light of attention by which essences appear and
intuitions are rendered actual, it would not be true
that I am confined or even situated in a particular
place and time, nor that in considering things remote
from my body, my thoughts are taking any unnatural
leap. The marvel, from the point of view of spirit, is
rather that it should need to be planted at all in the
sensorium of some living animal, and that, being
rooted there, it should take that accidental station for
its point of view in surveying all nature, and should
dignify one momentary phase of that animal life with
the titles of the Here and the Now. It is only spirit,
be it observed, that can do this. In themselves all
the points of space-time are equally central and
palpitating, and every phase of every psyche is a focus
for actual readjustments to the whole universe. How
then can the spirit, which would seem to be the
principle of universality and justice, take up its station
in each of these atoms and fight its battles for it, and
prostitute its own light in the service of that desperate
blindness ? Can reason do nothing better than supply
the eloquence of prejudice ? Such are the puzzles
which spirit might find, I will not say in the leap of
knowledge, but in the fatality which links the spirit
to a material organ so that, in order to reach other
things, it is obliged to leap ; or rather can never reach
other things, because it is tethered to its starting-point,
except by its intent in leaping, and cannot even
discover the stepping-stone on which it stands because
its whole life is the act of leaping away from it. There
is no reason, therefore, in so far as knowledge is an
apanage of spirit, why knowledge should not bathe all
time and all existence in an equal light, and see every
thing as it is, with an equal sympathy and immediacy.

i66 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

The problem for the spirit is how it could ever come
to pick out one body or another for its cynosure and
for its instrument, as if it could not see save through
such a little eye-glass, and in such a violent perspective.
This problem, 1 think, has a ready answer, but it is
not one that spirit could ever find of itself, without a
long and docile apprenticeship in the school of animal
faith. This answer is that spirit, with knowledge and
all its other prerogatives, is intrinsically and altogether
a function of animal life ; so that if it were not lodged
in some body and expressive of its rhythms and
relations, spirit would not exist at all. But this
solution, even when spirit is humble enough to accept
it, always seems to it a little disappointing and satirical.
Spirit, therefore, has no need to leap in order to
know, because in its range as spirit it is omnipresent
and omnimodal. Events which are past or future in
relation to the phase of the psyche which spirit expresses
in a particular instance, or events which are remote
from that psyche in space, are not for that reason
remote from spirit, or out of its cognitive range : they
are merely hidden, or placed in a particular perspective
for the moment, like the features of a landscape by
the hedges and turns of a road. Just as all essences
are equally near to spirit, and equally fit and easy
to contemplate, if only a psyche with an affinity to
those essences happens to arise ; so all existing things,
past, future, or infinitely distant, are equally within
the range of knowledge, if only a psyche happens to
be directed upon them, and to choose terms, however
poor or fantastic, in which to describe them. In
choosing these terms the psyche creates spirit, for
they are essences given in intuition ; and in directing
her action or endeavour, backward or forward, upon
those remote events, she creates intent in the spirit,
so that the given essences become descriptions of the
things with which the psyche is then busied.

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 167

But how, I may ask, can intent distinguish its
hidden object, so that an image, distorted or faithful,
may be truly or falsely projected there, or used to
describe it ? How does the spirit divine that there is
such an object, or where it lies ? And how can it
appeal to a thing which is hidden, the object of mere
intent, as to a touchstone or standard for its various
descriptions of that object, and say to them, as they
suggest themselves in turn : You are too vague,
You are absurd, You are better, You are absolutely
right ?

I answer that it does so by animal presumption,
positing whatsoever object instinct is materially pre
disposed to cope with, as in hunger, love, fighting, or
the expectation of a future. But before developing
this reply, let me make one observation. Since in
tuition of essence is not knowledge, knowledge can
never lie in an overt comparison of one datum with
another datum given at the same time ; even in pure
dialectic, the comparison is with a datum believed to
have been given formerly. If both terms were simply
given they would compose a complex essence, without
the least signification. Only when one of the terms
is indicated by intent, without being given exhaust
ively, can the other term serve to define the first
more fully, or be linked with it in an assertion which
is not mere tautology. An object of faith — and know
ledge is one species of faith — can never, even in the
most direct perception, come within the circle of
intuition. Intuition of things is a contradiction in
terms. If philosophers wish to abstain from faith,
and reduce themselves to intuition of the obvious,
they are free to do so, but they will thereby renounce
all knowledge, and live on passive illusions. No fact,
not even the fact that these illusions exist, would ever
be, or would ever have been, anything but the false
idea that they had existed. There would be nothing

i68 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

but the realm of essence, without any intuition of any
part of it, nor of the whole : so that we should be
driven back to a nihilism which only silence and death
could express consistently ; since the least actual
assertion of it, by existing, would contradict it.

Even such acquaintance with the realm of essence
as constitutes some science or recognisable art — like
mathematics or music — lies in intending and positing
great stretches of essence not now given, so that the
essences now given acquire significance and become
pregnant, to my vital feeling, with a thousand things
which they do not present actually, but which I know
where to look for eventually, and how to await.
Suppose a moment ago I heard a clap of thunder, loud
and prolonged, but that the physical shock has sub
sided and I am conscious of repose and silence. I
may find some difficulty, although the thing was so
recent, in rehearsing even now the exact volume, tone,
and rumblings of that sound ; yet I know the theme
perfectly, in the sense that when it thunders again, I
can say with assurance whether the second crash was
longer, louder, or differently modulated. In such a
case I have no longer an intuition of the first thunder
clap, but a memory of it which is knowledge ; and I
can define on occasion, up to a certain point and not
without some error, the essence given in that particular
past intuition. Thus even pure essences can become
objects of intent and of tentative knowledge when
they are not present in intuition but are approached
and posited indirectly, as the essences given on another
particular occasion or signified by some particular word.
The wrord or the occasion are natural facts, and my
knowledge is focussed upon them in the first instance
by ordinary perception or conception of nature : and
the essence I hope to recover is elicited gradually,
imaginatively, perhaps incorrectly, at the suggestion
of those assumed facts, according to my quickness of

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 169

wit, or my familiarity with the conventions of that
art or science. In this way it becomes possible and
necessary to learn about essences as if they were
things, not initially by a spontaneous and complete
intuition, but by coaxing the mind until possibly, at
the end, it beholds them clearly. This is the sort
of intuition which is mediated by language and by
works of fine art ; also by logic and mathematics, as
they are learned from teachers and out of books. It
is not happy intuition of some casual datum : it is
laborious recovery, up to a certain point, of the sort
of essence somebody else may have intuited. Whereas
intuition, which reveals an essence directly, is not
knowledge, because it has no ulterior object, the
designation of some essence by some sign does convey
knowledge, to an intelligent pupil, of what that essence
was. Obviously such divination of essences present
elsewhere, so that they become present here also, in
so far as it is knowledge, is trebly faith. Faith first
in the document, as a genuine natural fact and not a
vapid fancy of my own ; for instance, belief that
there is a book called the Bible, really handed down
from the ancient Jews and the early Christians, and
that I have not merely dreamt of such a book. Faith
then in the significance of that document, that it
means some essence which it is not ; in this instance,
belief that the sacred writers were not merely speaking
with tongues but were signifying some intelligible
points in history and philosophy. Faith finally in my
success in interpreting that document correctly, so
that the essences it suggests to me now are the very
essences it expressed originally : in other words, the
belief that when I read the Bible I understand it as
it was meant, and not fantastically.

I revert now to the question how it is possible to
posit an object which is not a datum, and how without
knowing positively what this object is I can make it

i yo SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

the criterion of truth in my ideas. How can I test
the accuracy of descriptions by referring them to a
subject-matter which is not only out of view now but
which probably has never been more than an object
of intent, an event which even while it was occurring
was described by me only in terms native to my fancy ?
If I know a man only by reputation, how should I
judge if the reputation is deserved ? If I know things
only by representations, are not the representations
the only things I know ?

This challenge is fundamental, and so long as the
assumptions which it makes are not challenged in
turn, it drives critics of knowledge inexorably to
scepticism of a dogmatic sort, I mean to the assertion
that the very notion of knowledge is absurd. One
assumption is that knowledge should be intuition :
but I have already come to the conclusion that in
tuition is not knowledge. So long as a knowledge is
demanded that shall be intuition, the issue can only
be laughter or despair ; for if I attain intuition, I
have only a phantom object, and if I spurn that and
turn to the facts, I have renounced intuition. This
assumption alone suffices, therefore, to disprove the
possibility of knowledge. But in case the force of
this disproof escaped us, another assumption is at
hand to despatch the business, namely, the assumption
that in a true description — if we grant knowledge by
description — the terms should be identical with the
constituents of the object, so that the idea should
look like the thing that it knows. This assumption
is derived from the other, or is a timid form of it : for
it is supposed that I know by intuiting my idea, and
that unless that idea resembled the object I wish to
know, I could not even by courtesy be said to have
discovered the latter. But the intuition of an idea,
let me repeat, is not knowledge ; and if a thing re
sembling that idea happened to exist, my intuition

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 171

would still not be knowledge of it, but contemplation
of the idea only.

Plato and many other philosophers, being in love
with intuition (for which alone they were perhaps
designed by nature), have identified science with
certitude, and consequently entirely condemned what
I call knowledge (which is a form of animal faith) or
relegated it to an inferior position, as something merely
necessary for life. I myself have no passionate attach
ment to existence, and value this world for the in
tuitions it can suggest, rather than for the wilderness
of facts that compose it. To turn away from it may
be the deepest wisdom in the end. What better than
to blow out the candle, and to bed ! But at noon this
pleasure is premature. I can always hold it in reserve,
and perhaps nihilism is a system — the simplest of all
— on which we shall all agree in the end. But I seem
to see very clearly now that in doing so we should all
be missing the truth : not indeed by any false assertion,
such as may separate us from the truth now, but by
dumb ignorance — a dumb ignorance which, when
proposed as a solution to actual doubts, is the most
radical of errors, since it ignores and virtually denies
the pressure of those doubts, and their living presence.
Accordingly, so long as I remain awake and the light
burning, that total dogmatic scepticism is evidently an
impossible attitude. It requires me to deny what I
assert, not to mean what I mean, and (in the sense in
which seeing is believing) not to believe what I see.
If I wish, therefore, to formulate in any way my
actual claim to knowledge — a claim which life, and in
particular memory, imposes upon me — I must revise
the premisses of this nihilism. For I have been led
to it not by any accidental error, but by the logic of
the assumption that knowledge should be intuition of
fact. It is this presumption that must be revoked.

Knowledge is no such thing. It is not intramental

172 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

nor internal to experience. Not only does it not
require me to compare two given terms and to find
them similar or identical, but it positively excludes
any intuitive possession of its object. Intuition sub
sists beneath knowledge, as vegetative life subsists
beneath animal life, and within it. Intuition may also
supervene upon knowledge, when all I have learned of
the universe, and all my concern for it, turn to a
playful or a hypnotising phantom ; and any poet or
philosopher, like any flower, is free to prefer intuition
to knowledge. But in preferring intuition he prefers
ignorance. Knowledge is knowledge because it has
compulsory objects that pre-exist. It is incidental to
the predicaments and labour of life : also to its
masterful explorations and satirical moods. It is
reflected from events as light is reflected from bodies.
It expresses in discourse the modified habits of an
active being, plastic to experience, and capable of
readjusting its organic attitude to other things on the
same material plane of being with itself. The place
and the pertinent functions of these several things
are indicated by the very attitude ot the animal who
notices them ; this attitude, physical and practical,
determines the object of intent, which discourse is
about.

When the proverbial child cries for the moon, is
the object of his desire doubtful ? He points at it
unmistakably ; yet the psychologist (not to speak of
the child himself) would have some difficulty in re
covering exactly the sensations and images, the gather
ing demands and fumbling efforts, that traverse the
child's mind while he points. Fortunately all this
fluid sentience, even if it could be described, is ir
relevant to the question ; for the child's sensuous
experience is not his object. If it were, he would
have attained it. What his object is, his fixed gaze
and outstretched arm declare unequivocally. His

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 173

elders may say that he doesn't know what he wants,
which is probably true of them also : that is, he has
only a ridiculously false and inconstant idea of what
the moon may be in itself. But his attention is
arrested in a particular direction, his appetition flows
the same way ; and if he may be said to know any
thing, he knows there is something there which he
would like to reach, which he would like to know
better. He is a little philosopher ; and his knowledge,
if less diversified and congealed, is exactly like science.

The attitude of his body in pointing to the moon,
and his tears, fill full his little mind, which not only
reverberates to this physical passion, but probably
observes it : and this felt attitude identifies the object
of his desire and knowledge in the physical world. It
determines what particular thing, in the same space
and time with the child's body, was the object of that
particular passion. If the object which the body is
after is identified, that which the soul is after is
identified too : no one, I suppose, would carry dualism
so far as to assert that when the mouth waters at the
sight of one particular plum, the soul may be yearning
for quite another.

The same bodily attitude of the child identifies the
object in the discourse of an observer. In perceiving
what his senses are excited by, and which way his
endeavour is turned, I can see that the object of
his desire is the moon, which I too am looking at.
That I am looking at the same moon as he can be
proved by a little triangulation : our glances converge
upon it. If the child has reached the inquisitive age
and asks " What is that ? " I understand what he
means by " that " and am able to reply sapiently
" That is the moon," only because our respective
bodies, in one common space, are discoverably turned
towards one material object, which is stimulating
them simultaneously. Knowledge of discourse in

174 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

other people, or of myself at other times, is what I
call literary psychology. It is, or may be, in its
texture, the most literal and adequate sort of knowledge
of which a mind is capable. If I am a lover of children,
and a good psycho-analyst, I may feel for a moment
exactly as the child feels in looking at the moon : and
I may know that I know his feeling, and very likely
he too will know that I know it, and we shall become
fast friends. But this rare adequacy of knowledge,
attained by dramatic sympathy, goes out to an object
which in its existence is known very indirectly :
because poets and religious visionaries feel this sort
of sympathy with all sorts of imaginary persons, of
whose existence and thoughts they have only intuition,
not knowledge. If I ask for evidence that such an
object exists, and is not an alter ego of my private
invention, I must appeal to my faith in nature, and
to my conventional assumption that this child and I
are animals of the same species, in the same habitat,
looking at the same moon, and likely to have the same
feelings : and finally the psychology of the tribe and
the crowd may enable me half to understand how we
know that we have the same feelings at once, when we
actually share them.

The attitude of the child's body also identifies the
object for him, in his own subsequent discourse. He is
not likely to forget a moon that he cried for. When in
stretching his hand towards it he found he could not
touch it, he learned that this bright good was not
within his grasp, and he made a beginning in the
experience of life. He also made a beginning in
science, since he then added the absolutely true
predicate " out of reach " to the rather questionable
predicates " bright " and " good ': (and perhaps
" edible ") with which his first glimpse had supplied
him. That active and mysterious thing, co-ordinate
with himself, since it lay in the same world with his

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 175

body, and affected it — the thing that attracted his
hand, was evidently the very thing that eluded it.
His failure would have had no meaning and would
have taught him nothing — that is, would not have
corrected his instinctive reactions — if the object he
saw and the object he failed to reach had not been
identical ; and certainly that object was not brightness
nor goodness nor excitements in his brain or psyche,
for these are not things he could ever have attempted
or expected to touch. It is only things on the scale
of the human senses and in the field of those instinctive
reactions which sensation calls forth, that can be the
primary objects of human knowledge : no other
things can be discriminated at first by an animal
mind, or can interest it, or can be meant and believed
in by it. It is these instinctive reactions that select
the objects of attention, designate their locus, and
impose faith in their existence. But these reactions
may be modified by experience, and the description
the mind gives of the objects reacted upon can be
revised, or the objects themselves discarded, and
others discerned instead. Thus the child's instinct
to touch the moon was as spontaneous and as confident
at first as his instinct to look at it ; and the object of
both efforts was the same, because the same external
agency aroused them, and with them the very hetero
geneous sensations of light and of disappointment.
These various terms of sense or of discourse, by which
the child described the object under whose attractions
and rebuffs he was living, were merely symbols to him,
like words. An animal naturally has as many signs
for an object as he has sensations or emotions in its
presence. These signs are miscellaneous essences —
sights, sounds, smells, contacts, tears, provocations—
and they are alternative or supplementary to one
another, like words in different languages. The most
diverse senses, such as smell and sight, if summoned

176 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

to the same point in the environment, and guiding
a single action, will report upon a single object. Even
when one sense brings all the news I have, its reports
will change from moment to moment with the distance,
variation, or suspension of the connection between the
object and my body : and this without any relevant
change in the object itself. Nay, often the very
transformation of the sensation bears witness that the
object is unchanged ; as music and laughter, over
heard as I pass a tavern, are felt and known to continue
unabated, and to be no merriment of mine, just
because they fade from my ears as I move away.

The object of knowledge being that designated in
this way by my bodily attitude, the aesthetic qualities
I attribute to it will depend on the particular sense
it happens to affect at the moment, or on the sweep
and nature of the reaction which it then calls forth
on my part. This diversity in signs and descriptions
for a single thing is a normal diversity. Diversity,
when it is not contradiction, irritates only unreasonably
dogmatic people ; they are offended with nature for
having a rich vocabulary, and sometimes speaking a
language, or employing a syntax, which they never
heard at home. It is an innocent prejudice, and it
yields easily in a generous mind to pleasure at the
wealth of alternatives which animal life affords. Even
such contradictions as may arise in the description of
things, and may truly demand a solution, reside in the
implication of the terms, not in their sensuous or
rhetorical diversity : they become contradictory only
when they assign to the object contrary movements
or contrary effects, not when they merely exhibit its
various appearances. Looking at the moon, one man
may call it simply a light in the sky ; another, prone
to dreaming awake, may call it a virgin goddess ; a
more observant person, remembering that this luminary
is given to waxing and waning, may call it the crescent ;

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 177

and a fourth, a full-fledged astronomer, may say
(taking the aesthetic essence before him merely for a
sign) that it is an extinct and opaque spheroidal
satellite of the earth, reflecting the light of the sun
from a part of its surface. All these descriptions
envisage the same object — otherwise no relevance,
conflict, or progress could obtain among them. What
that object is in its complete constitution and history
will never be known by man ; but that this object
exists in a known space and time and has traceable
physical relations with all other physical objects is a
fact posited from the beginning ; it was posited by
the child when he pointed, and by me when I saw
him point. If it did not so exist and (as sometimes
happens) he and I were suffering from a hallucination,
in thinking we were pointing at the moon we should
be discoverably pointing at vacancy : exploration
would eventually satisfy us of that fact, and any by
stander would vouch for it. But if in pointing at it
we were pointing to it, its identity would be fixed
without more ado ; disputes and discoveries concern
ing it would be pertinent and soluble, no matter what
diversity there might be in the ideal essences — light,
crescent, goddess, or satellite — which we used as
rival descriptions of it while we pointed.

I find that the discrimination of essence brings a
wonderful clearness into this subject. All data and
descriptions — light, crescent, goddess, or satellite-
are equally essences, terms of human discourse, in-
existent in themselves. What exists in any instance,
besides the moon and our various reactions upon it,
is some intuition, expressing those reactions, evoking
that essence, and lending it a specious actuality. The
terms of astronomy are essences no less human and
visionary than those of mythology ; but they are the
fruit of a better focussed, more chastened, and more
prolonged attention turned upon what actually occurs ;

N

i78

that is, they are kept closer to animal faith, and freer
from pictorial elements and the infusion of reverie.
In myth, on the contrary, intuition wanders idly and
uncontrolled ; it makes epicycles, as it were, upon the
reflex arc of perception ; the moonbeams bewitch
some sleeping Endymion, and he dreams of a swift
huntress in heaven. Myth is nevertheless a relevant
fancy, and genuinely expressive ; only instead of being
guided by a perpetual fresh study of the object posited
by animal faith and encountered in action, it runs into
marginal comments, personal associations, and rhetori
cal asides ; so that even if based originally on per
ception, it is built upon principles internal to human
discourse, as are grammar, rhyme, music, and morals.
It may be admirable as an expression of these principles,
and yet be egregiously false if asserted of the object,
without discounting the human medium in which it
has taken form. Diana is an exquisite symbol for the
moon, and for one sort of human loveliness ; but she
must not be credited with any existence over and above
that of the moon, and of sundry short-skirted Dorian
maidens. She is not other than they : she is an
image of them, the best part of their essence distilled
in a poet's mind. So with the description of the
moon given by astronomers, which is not less fascinat
ing ; this, too, is no added object, but only a new
image for the moon known even to the child and me.
The space, matter, gravitation, time, and laws of
motion conceived by astronomers are essences only,
and mere symbols for the use of animal faith, when
very enlightened : I mean in so far as they are alleged
to constitute knowledge of a world which I must bow
to and encounter in action ; for if astronomy is content
to be a mathematical exercise without any truth, an
object of pure intuition, its terms and its laws will, of
course, be ultimate realities, apart from what happens
to exist : realities in the realm of essence. In the

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 179

description of the natural world, however, they are
mere symbols, mediating animal faith. Science at
any moment may recast or correct its conceptions (as
it is doing now) giving them a different colour ; and
the nerve of truth in them will be laid bare and made
taut in proportion as the sensuous and rhetorical
vesture of these notions is stripped off, and the dynamic
relations of events, as found and posited by material
exploration, are nakedly recorded.

Knowledge accordingly is belief : belief in a world
of events, and especially of those parts of it which are
near the self, tempting or threatening it. This belief
is native to animals, and precedes all deliberate use of
intuitions as signs or descriptions of things ; as I turn
my head to see who is there, before I see who it is.
Furthermore, knowledge is true belief. It is such an
enlightening of the self by intuitions arising there,
that what the self imagines and asserts of the collateral
thing, with which it wrestles in action, is actually
true of that thing. Truth in such presumptions or
conceptions does not imply adequacy, nor a pictorial
identity between the essence in intuition and the
constitution of the object. Discourse is a language,
not a mirror. The images in sense are parts of dis
course, not parts of nature : they are the babble of
our innocent organs under the stimulus of things ;
but these spontaneous images, like the sounds of the
voice, may acquire the function of names ; they may
become signs, if discourse is intelligent and can re
capitulate its phases, for the things sought or en
countered in the world. The truth which discourse
can achieve is truth in its own terms, appropriate
description : it is no incorporation or reproduction
of the object in the mind. The mind notices and
intends ; it cannot incorporate or reproduce anything
not an intention or an intuition. Its objects are no
part of itself even when they are essences, much less

i8o SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

when they are things. It thinks the essences, with
that sort of immediate and self-forgetful attention
which I have been calling intuition ; and if it is
animated, as it usually is, by some ulterior interest or
pursuit, it takes the essences before it for messages,
signs, or emanations sent forth to it from those objects
of animal faith ; and they become its evidences and
its description for those objects. Therefore any degree
of inadequacy and originality is tolerable in discourse,
or even requisite, when the constitution of the objects
which the animal encounters is out of scale with his
organs, or quite heterogeneous from his possible
images. A sensation or a theory, no matter how
arbitrary its terms (and all language is perfectly
arbitrary), will be true of the object, if it expresses
some true relation in which that object stands to the
self, so that these terms are not misleading as signs,
however poetical they may be as sounds or as pictures.

Finally, knowledge is true belief grounded in
experience, I mean, controlled by outer facts. It is
not true by accident ; it is not shot into the air on the
chance that there may be something it may hit. It
arises by a movement of the self sympathetic or
responsive to surrounding beings, so that these beings
become its intended objects, and at the same time an
appropriate correspondence tends to be established
between these objects and the beliefs generated under
their influence.

In regard to the original articles of the animal
creed — that there is a world, that there is a future,
that things sought can be found, and things seen can
be eaten — no guarantee can possibly be offered. I
am sure these dogmas are often false ; and perhaps
the event will some day falsify them all, and they will
lapse altogether. But while life lasts, in one form or
another this faith must endure. It is the initial
expression of animal vitality in the sphere of mind,

KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH 181

the first announcement that anything is going on.
It is involved in any pang of hunger, of fear, or of love.
It launches the adventure of knowledge. The object
of this tentative knowledge is things in general, what
soever may be at work (as I am) to disturb me or
awake my attention. The effort of knowledge is to
discover what sort of world this disturbing world
happens to be. Progress in knowledge lies open in
various directions, now in the scope of its survey, now
in its accuracy, now in its depth of local penetration.
The ideal of knowledge is to become natural science :
if it trespasses beyond that, it relapses into intuition,
and ceases to be knowledge.

CHAPTER XIX

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE

ALL knowledge, being faith in an object posited and
partially described, is belief in substance, in the
etymological sense of this word ; it is belief in a thing
or event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for
the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and
perhaps name or define it. In this way my whole
past lies waiting for memory to review it, if I have
this faculty ; and the whole future of the world in
the same manner is spread out for prophecy, scientific
or visionary, to predict falsely or truly. Yet the
future and the past are not ordinarily called sub
stances ; probably because the same material substance
is assumed to run through both. Nevertheless, from
the point of view of knowledge, every event, even if
wholly psychological or phenomenal, is a substance.
It is a self-existing fact, open to description from the
point of view of other events, if in the bosom of these
other events there is such plasticity and intent as are
requisite for perception, prophecy, or memory.

When modern philosophers deny material sub
stance, they make substances out of the sensations or
ideas which they regard as ultimate facts. It is
impossible to eliminate belief in substance so long as
belief in existence is retained. A mistrust in existence,
and therefore in substance, is not unphilosophical ;
but modern philosophers have not given full expression

182

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 183

to this sceptical scruple. They have seldom been
disinterested critics, but often advocates of some
metaphysic that allured them, and whose rivals they
wished to destroy. They deny substance in favour
of phenomena, which are hypostatised essences, because
phenomena are individually wholly open to intuition ;
but they forget that no phenomenon can intuit another,
and that if it contains knowledge of that other, it
must be animated by intent, and besides existing itself
substantially must recognise its object as another
substance, indifferent in its own being to the cognisance
which other substances may take of it. In other words,
although each phenomenon in passing is an object of
intuition, all absent phenomena, and all their relations,
are objects of faith ; and this faith must be mediated
by some feature in the present phenomenon which
faith assumes to be a sign of the existence of other
phenomena elsewhere, and of their order. So that
in so far as the instinctive claims and transcendent
scope of knowledge are concerned, phenomenalism fully
retains the belief in substance. In order to get rid
of this belief, which is certainly obnoxious to the
sceptic, a disinterested critic would need to discard
all claims to knowledge, and to deny his own existence
and that of all absent phenomena.

For my own part, having admitted discourse
(which involves time and existences deployed in time,
but synthesised in retrospect), and having admitted
shocks that interrupt discourse and lead it to regard
itself as an experience, and having even admitted that
such experience involves a self beneath discourse, with
an existence and movement of its own — I need not
be deterred by any a priori objections from believing
in substance of any sort. For me it will be simply
a question of good sense and circumstantial evidence
how many substances I admit, and of what sort.

In the genesis of human knowledge (which I am

1 84 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

not attempting to trace here) the substance first posited
is doubtless matter, some alluring or threatening or
tormenting thing. The ego, as Fichte tells us, un
aware of itself, posits a non-ego, and then by reflection
posits itself as the agent in that positing, or as the
patient which the activity posited in the non-ego posits
in its turn. But all this positing \vould be mere folly,
unless it was an intelligent discovery of antecedent
facts. Why should a non-existent ego be troubled
with the delirious duty of positing anything at all ?
And, if nothing else exists, what difference could it
make what sort of a world the ego posited, or whether
it posited a thousand inconsequential worlds, at once
or in succession ? Fichte, however, was far from
sharing that absolute freedom in madness which he
attributes to the creative ego ; he had a very tight
tense mind, and posited a very tense tight world.
His myths about the birth of knowledge (or rather of
systematic imagination) out of unconscious egos, acts,
and positings concealed some modest truths about
nature. The actual datum has a background, and
Fichte was too wise to ignore so tremendous a fact.
Romantic philosophy, like romantic poetry, has its
profound ways of recognising its own folly, and so
turning it into tragic wisdom. As a matter of fact,
the active ego is an animal living in a material world ;
both the ego and the non-ego exist substantially before
acquiring this relation of positing and being posited.
The instinct and ability to posit objects, and the
occasion for doing so, are incidents in the develop
ment of animal life. Positing is a symptom of sensi
bility in an organism to the presence of other sub
stances in its environment. The sceptic, like the sick
man, is intent on the symptom ; and positing is his
name for felt plasticity in his animal responses. It is
not a bad name ; because plasticity, though it may
seem a passive thing, is really a spontaneous quality.

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 185

If the substance of the ego were not alive, it would not
leap to meet its opportunities, it would not develop
new organs to serve its old necessities, and it would
not kindle itself to intuition of essences, nor concern
itself to regard those essences as appearances of the
substances with which it was wrestling. The whole
life of imagination and knowledge comes from within,
from the restlessness, eagerness, curiosity, and terror
of the animal bent on hunting, feeding, and breeding ;
and the throb of being which he experiences at any
moment is not proper to the datum in his mind's eye
— a purely fantastic essence — but to himself. It is
out of his organism or its central part, the psyche,
that this datum has been bred. The living substance
within him being bent, in the first instance, on pur
suing or avoiding some agency in its environment, it
projects whatever (in consequence of its reactions)
reaches its consciousness into the locus whence it feels
the stimulus to come, and it thus frames its description
or knowledge of objects. In this way the ego really
and sagaciously posits the non-ego : not absolutely,
as Fichte imagined, nor by a gratuitous fiat, but on
occasion and for the best of reasons, when the non-
ego in its might shakes the ego out of its primitive
somnolence.

Belief in substance is accordingly identical with
the claim to knowledge, and so fundamental that no
evidence can be adduced for it which does not pre
suppose it. In recognising any appearance as a witness
to substance and in admitting (or even in rejecting)
the validity of such testimony, I have already made a
substance of the appearance ; and if I admit other
phenomena as well, I have placed that substance in
a world of substances having a substantial unity. It
is not to external pressure, through evidence or
argument, that faith in substance is due. If the
sceptic cannot find it in himself, he will never find it.

1 86 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

I for one will honour him in his sincerity and in his
solitude. But I will not honour him, nor think him
a philosopher, if he is a sceptic only histrionically, in
the wretched controversies of the schools, and believes
in substance again when off the stage. I am not
concerned about make-believe philosophies, but about
my actual beliefs. It is only out of his own mouth,
or rather out of his own heart, that I should care to
convince the sceptic. Scepticism, if it could be
sincere, would be the best of philosophies. But I
suspect that other sceptics, as well as I, always believe
in substance, and that their denial of it is sheer sophistry
and the weaving of verbal arguments in which their
most familiar and massive convictions are ignored.

It might seem ignominious to believe something on
compulsion, because I can't help believing it ; when
reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons for every
thing. Yet this demand is unreasonable : there
cannot be a reason for everything. It is mere auto
matic habit in the philosopher to make this demand,
as it is in the common man not to make it. When
once I have admitted the facts of nature, and taken
for granted the character of animal life, and the in
carnation of spirit in this animal life, then indeed
many excellent reasons for the belief in substance will
appear ; and not only reasons for using the category
of substance, and positing substance of some vague
ambient sort, but reasons for believing in a substance
rather elaborately defined and scientifically describable
in many of its habits and properties. But I am not
yet ready for that. Lest that investigation, when
undertaken, should ignore its foundations or be
impatient of its limits, I must insist here that trust in
knowledge, and belief in anything to know, are merely
instinctive and, in a manner, pathological. If philo
sophy were something prior to convention rather
than (as it is) only convention made consistent and

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 187

deliberate, philosophy ought to reject belief in sub
stance and in knowledge, and to entrench itself in the
sheer confession and analysis of this belief, as of all
others, without assenting to any of them. But I have
found that criticism has no first principle, that analysis
involves belief in discourse, and that belief in dis
course involves belief in substance ; so that any pre
tensions which criticism might set up to being more
profound than common sense would be false pre
tensions. Criticism is only an exercise of reflective
fancy, on the plane of literary psychology, an after
image of that faith in nature which it denies ; and in
dwelling on criticism as if it were more than a sub
jective perspective or play of logical optics, I should
be renouncing all serious philosophy. Philosophy is
nothing if not honest ; and the critical attitude, when
it refuses to rest at some point upon vulgar faith,
inhibits all belief, denies all claims to knowledge, and
becomes dishonest ; because it itself claims to know.

Does the process of experience, now that I trust
my memory to report it truly, or does the existence of
the self, now that I admit its substantial, dynamic, and
obscure life underlying discourse, require me to posit
any other substances ? Certainly it does. Experi
ence, for animal faith, begins by reporting what is not
experience ; and the life of the self, if I accept its
endeavours as significant, implies an equally sub
stantial, dynamic, ill-reported world around it, in
whose movements it is implicated. In conveying this
feeling, as in all else, experience might be pure illusion ;
but if I reject this initial and fundamental suasion of
my cognitive life, it will be hard to find anything
better to put in its place. I am unwilling to do myself
so much useless violence as to deny the validity of
primary memory, and assert that I have never, in
fact, had any experience at all ; and I should be doing
myself even greater violence if I denied the validity

1 88 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

of perception, and asserted that a thunder-clap, for
instance, was only a musical chord, with no formidable
event of any sort going on behind the sound. To be
startled is to be aware that something sudden and
mysterious has occurred not far from me in space.
The thunder-clap is felt to be an event in the self and
in the not-self, even before its nature as a sound — its
aesthetic quality for the self — is recognised at all ; I
first know I am shaken horribly, and then note how
loud and rumbling is the voice of the god that shakes
me. That first feeling of something violent and resist
less happening in the world at large, is accompanied
by a hardly less primitive sense of something gently
seething within me, a smouldering life which that
alien energy blows upon and causes to start into
flame.

If this be not the inmost texture of experience, I
do not know what experience is. To me experience
has not a string of sensations for its objects ; what it
brings me is not at all a picture-gallery of clear images,
with nothing before, behind, or between them. What
such a ridiculous psychology (made apparently by
studying the dictionary and not by studying the mind)
calls hypotheses, intellectual fictions, or tendencies
to feign, is the solid body of experience, on which
what it calls sensations or ideas hang like flimsy
garments or trinkets, or play like a shifting light
and shade. Experience brings belief in substance
(as alertness) before it brings intuition of essences ; it
is appetition before it is description. Of course
sensation would precede idea, if by sensation we
understood contact with matter, and by idea pure
reverie about ideal things ; but if idea means expecta
tion, or consciousness having intent, and if sensation
means aesthetic contemplation of data without belief,
then idea precedes sensation : because an animal is
aware that something is happening long before he

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 189

can say to himself what that something is, or what it
looks like. The ultimate datum to which a sceptic
may retreat, when he suspends all life and opinion,
some essence, pure and non-existent and out of all
relation to minds, bodies, or events — surely that is
not the stuff out of which experience is woven : it is
but the pattern or picture, the aesthetic image, which
the tapestry may ultimately offer to the gazing eye,
incurious of origins, and contemptuous of substance.
The radical stuff of experience is much rather breath-
lessness, or pulsation, or as Locke said (correcting
himself) a certain uneasiness ; a lingering thrill, the
resonance of that much-struck bell which I call my
body, the continual assault of some masked enemy,
masked perhaps in beauty, or of some strange sym
pathetic influence, like the cries and motions of other
creatures ; and also the hastening and rising of some
impulse in me in response. Experience, at its very
inception, is a revelation of things ; and these things,
before they are otherwise distinguished, are dis
tinguishable into a here and a there, a now and a then,
nature and myself in the midst of nature.

It is a mere prejudice of literary psychology, which
uses the grammar of adult discourse, like a mythology,
in which to render primitive experience — it is a mere
prejudice to suppose that experience has only such
categories as colour, sound, touch, and smell. These
essences are distinguished eventually because the
senses that present them can be separated at will, the
element each happens to furnish being thus flashed
on or cut off, like an electric light : but far more
primitive in animal experience are such dichotomies
as good and bad, near and far, coming and going, fast
and slow, just now and very soon. The first thing
experience reports is the existence of something,
merely as existence, the weight, strain, danger, and
lapse of being. If any one should tell me that this

1 9o SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

is an abstraction, I should reply that it would seem
an abstraction to a parrot, who used human words
without having human experience, but it is no abstrac
tion to a man, whose language utters imperfectly,
and by a superadded articulation, the life within him.
Aristotle, who so often seems merely grammatical,
was not merely grammatical when he chose substance
to be the first of his categories. He was far more
profoundly psychological in this than the British and
German psychologists who discard the notion of
substance because it is not the datum of any separate
sense. None of the separate data of sense, which are
only essences, would figure at all in an experience, or
would become terms in knowledge, if a prior interest
and faith did not apprehend them. Animal watchful
ness, lying in wait for the signals of the special senses,
lends them their significance, sets them in their places,
and retains them, as descriptions of things, and as
symbols in its owrn ulterior discourse.

This animal watchfulness carries the category of
substance with it, asserts existence most vehemently,
and in apprehension seizes and throws on the dark
screen of substance every essence it may descry. To
grope, to blink, to dodge a blow, or to return it, is to
have very radical and specific experiences, but probably
without one assignable image of the outer senses.
Yet a nameless essence, the sense of a moving existence,
is there most intensely present ; and a man would be
a shameless, because an insincere, sceptic, who should
maintain that this experience exists in vacuo, and does
not express, as it feels it does, the operation of a
missile flying, and the reaction of a body threatened
or hit : motions in substance anterior to the experience,
and rich in properties and powers which no experience
will ever fathom.

Belief in substance, taken transcendentally, as a
critic of knowledge must take it, is the most irrational,

BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 191

animal, and primitive of beliefs : it is the voice of
hunger. But when, as I must, I have yielded to this
presumption, and proceeded to explore the world, I
shall find in its constitution the most beautiful justifica
tion for my initial faith, and the proof of its secret
rationality. This corroboration will not have any
logical force, since it will be only pragmatic, based on
begging the question, and perhaps only a bribe offered
by fortune to confirm my illusions. The force of the
corroboration will be merely moral, showing me how
appropriate and harmonious with the nature of things
such a blind belief was on my part. How else should
the truth have been revealed to me at all ? Truth
and blindness, in such a case, are correlatives, since
I am a sensitive creature surrounded by a universe
utterly out of scale with myself : I must, therefore,
address it questioningly but trustfully, and it must
reply to me in my own terms, in symbols and parables,
that only gradually enlarge my childish perceptions.
It is as if Substance said to Knowledge : My child,
there is a great world for thee to conquer, but it is a
vast, an ancient, and a recalcitrant world. It yields
wonderful treasures to courage, when courage is
guided by art and respects the limits set to it by
nature. I should not have been so cruel as to give
thee birth, if there had been nothing for thee to
master ; but having first prepared the field, I set in
thy heart the love of adventure.

CHAPTER XX

ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE

ACCORDING to those philosophers who look for the
foundations of the universe in their own minds,
substance is but a dead and fantastic thing — a ghost
or abstracted shadow of many sensations, impossibly
fused and objectified. These philosophers, in their
intense introspection, try to catch thought alive, and
the nearer they come to doing so, the more unstable
and unsubstantial they find it to be. It exists only
in the act of dominating or positing or meaning some
thing ; and before this something can be specified
exhaustively, something else has taken its place, the
limits of vision having expanded or its centre shifted.
Such self-observation may be profound, or at least
sincere, although what is true of life in one animal or
at one moment might well be false of life in another
instance, and mere nonsense to a different mind. In
myself, I find experience so volatile that no insistence
on its unsubstantial flux, maniacally creative, seems to
me exaggerated. But before such observations of life
in the quick can be turned into arguments against the
existence of substance, three assumptions must be
made silently, all three of which are false : first, that
thought observes itself ; secondly, that if thought is
itself in flux it can observe nothing permanent ; and
lastly, that if direct observation offered no illustration

192

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 193

of the permanent, nothing permanent could exist in
fact, or could be reasonably believed to exist.

In the first place, living thought is so far from
observing itself, that some philosophers deny its
existence, and the others find the greatest difficulty in
distinguishing it from its various objects. The terms
of pure thought, in which observation is couched and
in which it rests, I have found to be not thoughts but
essences ; and the objects of thought, when thought
relapses into its animal form of belief, are again not
thoughts but things. If later I contrast the order,
rate, and natural locus of discourse with the move
ment of events in general which discourse is consider
ing, I may begin to understand what a curious thing
discourse is, and to have assurance of its existence.
The introspection into which I may ultimately plunge,
when I seem to be creating the world as I think it, is a
violently artificial exercise, in which the wheels of life
are reversed ; and the knowledge I thus gain of my
imaginative operations would itself be sheer raving,
creating a dream about dreaming, unless these opera
tions were domiciled in a natural being, and expressed
his history and vulgar situation in the natural world ;
so that my eventual description, or rather dramatic
reconstruction, of my own experience, is one of the
latest forms of my knowledge, and its object one
of the most derivative and insecure. It is a theme
for literary psychology, of which transcendental self-
consciousness, or autobiography, is one variety.

In the second place, permanence rather than change
is native to the prime objects of thought. The only
data observable directly are essences absolutely im
mutable in their nature, even if the one observed
happens to be the essence of change ; since even this,
so long as it is present at all, presents change and
nothing but change for ever. Attention of course is
continually drawn from one essence to another ; but

o

i94 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

this inconstancy in intuition could not be noticed,
and could not actually exist, if the essence which drops
out of view and that which succeeds it were not
different, and each, therefore, always itself. Further
more, granting that an animal mind is probably
always changing in some respect, it by no means
follows that no essence can be retained for more than
one instant under the light of attention. On the
contrary, change that was complete, and that sub
stituted one totally new object for another totally
destroyed, would afford no inkling of its own existence:
only the permanent would ever appear to the mind.
What happens is that some detail changes in a field
that does not change, and for that reason the new
element attracts attention, surprise, or joy. To hold
something fast, to watch, to stare, to wait and lie low
in the presence of a felt incubus, are primitive ex
periences ; and the length of crawling time through
which a strain endures is a conspicuous feature in
sensation, especially in pain. This sense of duration
doubtless involves the sense of something changing at
the same time — of something coming or continuing
to come as it threatened or as it was demanded — of
some pulse of feeling recurring and mounting towards
increased potency or increased fatigue. Yet in all this
setting of cumulative change (which is but a per
spective in the fancy) there often shines a fixed focus
of interest ; and the sense of something which lasts,
and which remains itself whether I approach or elude
it, is one of the first and loudest notes of awareness.
Perhaps, when my mood is clear and musical, there is
some permanent essence clearly revealed that arouses
my curiosity and wonder ; or when the stream runs
thick and turbid, the obscure life of the psyche itself
rises to the surface, and yields the primary criterion
of happiness and naturalness in events. In either case
in mastering, recognising, and positing what I find

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 195

or what I want, I know the beginnings of speculative
joy and of participation in eternity. The flux touches
the eternal at the top of every wave. Whatever
thwarts this achievement, or disturbs the deep rhythms
of the life slumbering beneath, seems illegitimate ; and
until acquisitive or sexual impulses are aroused, the
dozing animal counts on a perpetual well-being, and
any change seems to it as hateful as it is incredible.

In this way change itself, when it is rhythmic and
regular, wears to intuition the form of sustained being.
The life of the body, by its latent operation, sets a
measure and scale for the duration of any passing
vision. There is an ever-present background felt as
permanent, myself always myself ; and there is a
large identity in the universe also, familiar and limited
in spite of its agitation, like a cage full of birds. Every
thing seems to be more or less prolonged ; comfort,
digestive warmth, the past still simmering, the brood
ing potentiality of things to come, shaping themselves
in fancy before they have occurred. Both sleep and
watchfulness are long drawn out, so is the very sense
of movement. Though change be everywhere, it
remains everywhere strange and radically unwelcome :
for even when, as in destructive passion or impatience,
it is imperatively sought, it is sought as an escape
from an uncomfortable posture, in the hope of restor
ing a steady life, and resting in safety.

Thus the notion of permanence behind change—
which is a chief element in the notion of substance-
is trebly rooted in experience ; because every essence
that appears is eternally what it is ; because many
congenial images and feelings appear lastingly ; and
because whatever interrupts the even flow and luxurious
monotony of organic life is odious to the primeval
animal.

In the third place, even if direct experience did
not illustrate the permanent, the order of events when

196 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

reflected on would suggest and impose a belief in it.
I reserve for another occasion all discussion of the
laws of nature or of the constant quantities of matter
or energy : the most ordinary recognition of things
being as they were, and remaining always at hand,
posits their substantial nature. Suppose all intuition
was instantaneous ; and in one sense it may be said
always to be so, because specious durations have no
common scale, and the most prolonged may be treated
as a single moment, as the dome of St. Peter's may
be seen through a keyhole. Instantaneous intuition,
when suspended, may be suspended only for a moment,
and instantly recovered, as when I blink. Such brief
interruptions to perception are bridged over in primary
memory, and do not break the specious identity and
continuity of the object. It does not follow, however,
that the interruption is not felt. On the contrary, it
is felt and resented just because beneath it the object
is sensibly continuous. There is a stock optical
experiment in which a pencil is made to cross the field
of vision between the eye and a book, without ever
hiding any part of the page. What binocular vision
does in that instance, the persistence of impressions
does in the case of an intermittent stimulus. The
interruption is startling and obvious, but the con
tinuity of the object is obvious too. This experience
may be repeated on a larger scale. The psyche, being
surrounded by substances, is adapted to them, and
does not suspend her adjustments or her beliefs when
ever her sensations are interrupted. Children recog
nise and identify things and persons more readily than
they distinguish them. As intuition is addressed to
terms in discourse which are eternal in their nature,
though the intuition of them is desultory, so faith
and art are addressed to habits in substance, which
without arresting the perpetual and pervasive flux
of experience (nor perhaps that of substance itself)

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 197

manifest its dynamic permanence ; and, of course, it
is on its dynamic side, not pictorially or intuitively,
that substance is conceived, posited, measured, and
trusted.

Hence the discovery, big with scientific con
sequences, that an existing thing may endure un
changed, although my experience of it be intermittent.
The object of these recurrent observations is not
conceived, as a sophistical psychology would have it,
by feigning that the observations are not discrete.
Every one knows, when he shuts and opens his eyes,
that his vision has been interrupted ; the interruption
is the point of the game. The notion that the thing
persists was there from the beginning ; until I blinked,
I had found it persisting, and I find it persisting still
after I open my eyes again. In considering the
fortunes of the object posited, I simply discard the
interruption, as voluntary and due to a change in
myself which I can repeat at will. In spontaneous
thought I never confuse the changes which the thing
may undergo in its own being with the variations in
niy attention nor (when I have a little experience) with
shifts in my perspectives. I therefore recognise it to
be permanent in relation to my intermittent glimpses
of it ; and this without in the least confusing or fusing
my different views, or supposing them to be other
than discrete and perhaps instantaneous.

On the same principle, as education advances, a
thing which stimulates different senses at once or
successively is easily recognised to be the same object ;
and this, again, is done without in the least fusing or
confusing colour with hardness or sound with shape.
And with the growth of the arts and of experience of
the world, the persisting and continuous engine of
nature is clearly conceived as the common object
which all my senses and all my theories describe in
their special languages at their several awakenings.

198 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

That the syllables are broken does not make their
messages conflicting ; on the contrary, they supple
ment one another's blindness, and correct one another's
exuberance. Substance was their common object
from the beginning, faith in substance not being a
consequence of reasoning .about appearances, but an
implication of action, and a conviction native to
hunger, fear, feeding, and fighting ; as an aid and
guide to which the organs of the outer senses are
developed, and rapidly paint their various symbols in
the mind. The euphony and syntax of sense, far from
disproving the existence of substance, arise and change
in the act of expressing its movement, and especially
the responsive organisation of that part of it which is
myself.

So much for the objections to the belief in substance
which may be raised from the point of view of self-
consciousness, when this is regarded as the principle
of knowledge or even of universal existence, neither
of which it is.

Objections to the belief in substance may also come
from a different quarter (or one ostensibly different),
in the name of critical sense and economy in the inter
pretation of appearances. Suppose, the empiricist
may say, that your substance exists : how does it help
you to explain anything ? You never have seen, and
you never will see, anything but appearances. If you
trust your memory (as it is reasonable to do, since you
must, if you are to play the game of discourse at all)
you may assume that appearances have come in a
certain order ; and if you trust expectation (for the
same bad reason) you may assume that they will come
in somewhat the same order in future. These assump
tions are not founded on any proof or on any real
probability, but it is intelligible that you should make
them, because the mind can hardly be asked to dis
credit its vistas, when it has nothing else by which

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 199

to criticise them. But why should you interpolate
amongst appearances, or posit behind them, some
thing that you can never find ? That seems a gratuitous
fiction, and at best a hypostasis of grammar and names.
You want a substance because you use substantives,
or because your verbal logic talks in subjects and
predicates.

But let us grant, the empiricist will go on, that
your substance is possible, since everything is possible
where ignorance is complete. In what terms can you
conceive it, save in terms of appearance ? Or if you
say it exists unconceived, or is inconceivable, it will
simply encumber your philosophy with a metaphysical
world, in addition to the given one, and with the
hopeless problem of relating the two.

These empirical objections to the belief in substance
might in strictness be ruled out, since (in so far as
they deny substance) they rest on the same romantic
view of self-consciousness as the source of knowledge
and being as do the transcendental objections just
considered. Empiricism, however, has the advantage
of being less resolute in folly. Such terms as appear
ance, phenomenon, given fact (meaning given essence
plus thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition
plus belief) are all used sophistically to cover the
muddles of introspection. They are not analysed
critically, but are allowed to retain in solution many
of the assumptions of common sense. The essence
given is confused with the intuition of it which is
not given, but which common sense knows is im
plicated. This intuition is then confused with the
belief, prompted by animal impulse and, for analysis,
utterly gratuitous, that a thing or event exists definable
by the essence given. This belief finally is confused
with the existence of its object, which it merely posits
and cannot witness. This object, in psychological
idealism, is some ulterior intuition or (as it is called

200 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

by common sense, which assumes a material object
producing it) some ulterior perception. But it is
utterly impossible that one perception should perceive
another, and it is improper to call an intuition a per
ception when it has no existing object.

In consequence of this halting criticism of im
mediate experience, empiricism admits the existence
of many feelings or ideas deployed in time and referred
to in memory and in social intercourse ; and in
admitting this (let me repeat) it admits substance in
principle. Such a flux of feelings or ideas is a per
manent hidden substance for purposes of knowledge,
even if each of them, being a momentary life, might
not be called by that name. Each feeling or idea is
substantial, however, in respect to any memory or
theory, contained in some other moment, which may
refer to it ; and this memory or theory is an appear
ance of that substantial but remote fact.

Let us suppose that David Hume, in spite of his
corpulence, was nothing but a train of ideas. Some
of these composed his philosophy, and I, when I
endeavour to learn what it was, create in my own mind
a fresh train of ideas which refer to those in the mind
of Hume : and for me his opinions are a substance
of which my apprehension is an appearance. My
apprehension, in this case, is conceived to be an
apprehension of a matter of fact, namely, the substance
of Hume at some date ; and in studying his philosophy
I am learning nothing but history. This is an im
plication of empiricism, but is not true to the facts.
For when I try to conceive the philosophy of Hume I
am not considering any particular ideas which may
have constituted Hume at one moment of his career ;
I am considering an essence, his total system, as it
would appear when the essences present in his various
reflective moments are collated ; and, therefore, I am
really studying and learning a system of philosophy,

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 201

not the presumable condition of a dead man's mind
at various historical moments.

If empiricists were a little more sceptical, they
would perceive that in admitting knowledge of historical
facts they have admitted the principle that the beliefs
they call ideas may report the existence of natural
substances. If the substance of this world is a flux,
and even a flux of feelings, it is none the less sub
stantial, like the fire of Heraclitus, and the existing
object of such ideas as may describe it. But this
reasonable faith is obscured by the confusions I
mentioned above. The empiricist forgets that he is
asserting the existence of outlying facts, because he
half identifies them with the living fact of his present
belief in them : and, further, because he identifies
this living fact, his belief now, with the essence which
it is attributing to those remote existences. He thinks
he believes only what he sees, but he is much better
at believing than at seeing.

Apart from this unconscious admission of the
existence of substances, the empirical objections to
substance in the singular express a distrust of meta
physics with which I sympathise, and they show a
love of home truths which deserves to be satisfied.

In the first place, the substance in which I am
proposing to believe is not metaphysical but physical
substance. It is the varied stuff of the world which
I meet in action — the wood of this tree I am felling,
the wind that is stirring its branches, the flesh and
bones of the man who is jumping out of the way.
Belief in substance is not imported into animal per
ception by language or by philosophy, but is the soul
of animal perception from the beginning, and the
perpetual deliverance of animal experience. Later, as
animal attention is clarified, and animal experience
progresses, the description of these obvious substances
may be refined : the tree, the wind, and the man may

202 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

reveal their elements and genesis to more patient
observation, and the first aspect they wore may be
found to be a fused and composite appearance of
many elaborate processes within them. But the more
diffused substances in operation which I shall then
come upon will be simply the constituents of the tree,
the wind, and the man ; they will be just as truly
(though more calculably) the realities I confront and
may use in action. They will be just as open to
perception, although instruments or hypotheses may
be required to extend the accidental range of my
senses in observing them ; and they will be just as
much substances and not essences, that is, objects of
belief posited in action, not images given in intuition.
My notions of substance will therefore be subject to
error, and capable of reform : I may arrive at the
belief that earth, air, water, and fire are the substances
in all things ; later I may discover that fire is not a
substance, but a form of motion ; for earth, air, and
water I may come to substitute the four or five score
elements of chemistry, or more or less ; and I may
remain in doubt whether light and space and ether
are substances or not. But all these opinions would
be equally fantastic, and equally devoid of truth or
falsehood, if there were no substance before me in
the first instance which I was attempting to describe.

By a substance I understand what modern philo
sophers often call an "independent object"— a most
unfortunate phrase, because precisely at the moment
when a substance or an essence becomes my object,
by becoming the theme of my discourse, it ceases to
be independent of me in that capacity : and when this
happens, before the cognitive relation between me
and my object is established, a dynamic relation has
probably arisen between the substance of that object
and the substance of myself, causing me to make that
intrusive substance the object of my attention. When

a thing becomes my object it becomes dependent on
me ideally, for being known, and I am probably,
directly or indirectly, dependent on it materially, for
having been led to know it. What is independent of
knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, move
ment, origin, and destiny of its own, no matter what
I may think or fail to think about it. This self-
existence is what the name object jeopardises, and
what the name substance indicates and asserts.

If abuses of language were not inevitable, I should
be tempted to urge philosophers to revert to the
etymological and scholastic sense of the words object
and objective, making them refer to whatever is placed
before the mind, as a target to be aimed at by attention.
Objective would then mean present to imagination ;
and things would become objects of thought in the
same incidental way in which they become objects of
desire. But I will content myself with returning in
my own person to the correct use of the word substance
for whatever is self-existent, and with bestowing the
term object on occasion upon any substance, essence,
event, or truth, when it becomes incidentally the theme
of discourse.

Substances are called things when found cut up
into fragments which move together and are re
cognisable individually ; and things are called sub
stances when their diffuse and qualitative existence
is thought of rather than their spatial limits. Flour
is a substance and a loaf of bread is a thing ; but there
is nothing metaphysical about flour, nor is there any
difference of physical status between a thing and the
substance of it.

But is not the materia prima of Aristotle metaphysi
cal ? Is not the substance of Spinoza metaphysical ?
Are not souls and Platonic Ideas, which are also
reputed to be substances, perfectly metaphysical ?

Of course : and I shall have occasion, when

204 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

surveying the realm of matter, to show that these and
other metaphysical entities are only nominal essences,
and cannot be the substance of anything.

I think these explanations will suggest to the reader
a sufficient answer to the other points raised by the
empiricists against belief in substance. Substance
does not reduplicate natural objects, but is identical
with them. What it might be said to reduplicate (or
rather to back up and to render significant) would
be given essences. Certainly known substances, and
other known objects, require to be posited by animal
faith on occasion of intuitions, as that which these
intuitions report. But there is hardly any reduplica
tion here. Such representation as there is, is probably
quite heterogeneous in aspect from its original, and
even when — as in memory or a historical romance —
some specious similarity is presumed, it is a highly
selective and idealised reproduction, in a wholly
different medium from the represented facts, and
possessing utterly different functions and conditions
of being. Nature in being discovered is not re
produced, but acquires a new dimension, and is extra
ordinarily enriched. Matters are ludicrously reversed
if it is imagined that a pure spirit contemplating
essences could invent a body and a world of matter
surrounding it ; the body exists first, and in reacting
on its environment kindles intuitions expressive of its
vicissitudes ; and the commentary is like that which
any language or chronicle or graphic art creates by
existing. Substance is the speaker and substance is
the theme ; intuition is only the act of speaking or
hearing, and the given essence is the audible word.
Substance is on the same plane of being as trees and
houses, but, like trees and houses, it is on an entirely
different plane of being from the immediate terms of
experience (which are essences) and from experience
itself (which is spirit thinking).

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 205

As to the reproach that substance, because it is
not an appearance presented exhaustively, must remain
unconceived and inconceivable, it rests on a false
ideal of human knowledge. Intuition of essence is
not knowledge, but fancy and mental sport : and if
logic and mathematics are called sciences, they are
such only as expansions of given hypotheses according
to given rules may be sciences, as there is a science
of chess. They are not true nor human, except in
the special form in which actual discourse and actual
bodies happen to illustrate them. A preference for
dialectic over knowledge of fact (which is knowledge
of substance) may manifest a poetical and superior
spirit, as might a preference for music over conversa
tion ; but it would be vain and suicidal for human
knowledge to transfer that ideal to the general inter
pretation of experience. Substance being the object
set before me in action, pursuit, and investigation
cannot be antecedently in my possession, either
materially or intellectually ; it confronts me as some
thing challenging respect and demanding study ; and
its intrinsic essence must remain always problematical,
since I approach it only from the outside and ex
perimentally. The essences by which it is revealed
to me, and the hypotheses I frame about its nature,
are so many provocations for me to manipulate and
examine it, and to call it by various humorous names,
expressive to me of its strange habits. My natural
curiosity, if I am a healthy young animal, will prompt
me to do this eagerly, and to turn my first luminous
impressions into triumphant dogmas ; but to pure
spirit, when that awakes, all this faith and knowingness
will seem childish.

To pure spirit substance and all its ways must
remain always dark, alien, and impertinent. From
the transcendental point of view, which is that of
spirit, substance is an unattainable goal, or object-as-

ao6 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

such, being posited, not possessed. Only essences
please this jealous lover of light, and seem to it sufficient ;
it hates faith, existence, doubt, anything ulterior.
Substance and truth offend it by their unnecessary
claims ; it would gladly brush them aside as super
stitious obsessions. What ghostly thing, it says to
itself, is this Speaker behind the voice, this Meaning
behind the vision, this dark Substance behind the fair
appearance ? Substance interrupts and besets the
spirit in its innocence, and in its mad play ; one
substance, which it calls the flesh, torments it from
below, and a kindred substance, which it calls matter,
prods, crushes, and threatens it from without. God
also, another substance, looms before it, commanding
and forbidding ; and he is terrible in his wrath and
obscurity, until it learns his ways. Yet, as religion
shows, it is possible for the spirit to be tamed and
chastened. The fear of substance may be the begin
ning of wisdom ; and accustomed to the steady
dispensations of that power, the spirit may grow pious
and modest, and happy to be incarnate. God will
then become in its eyes a source of protection and
comfort and daily bread, as all substance is to those
who learn how to live with it. When the lessons of
experience are thus accepted, and spirit is domesticated
in the world, the belief in substance explains every
thing ; because if substance exists, a perpetual de
pendence in point of destiny, and a perpetual in
adequacy in knowledge are clearly inevitable, and soon
come to seem proper and even fortunate.

As knowledge advances, my conception of substance
becomes a map in which my body is one of the islets
charted : the relations of myself to everything else
may be expressed there in their true proportions, and
I shall cease to be an egotist. In the symbolic terms
which my map affords, I can then plan and test my
actions (which otherwise I should perform without

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 207

knowing it) and trace the course of other events ; but
I am myself a substance, moving in the plane of
universal substance, not on the plane of my map ;
for neither I nor the rest of substance belong to the
realm of pictures, nor exist on that scale and in that
flat dimension. How we exist and what we are
substantially must accordingly remain a problem to
the end ; even if by chance I should ever hit upon the
essence of substance, nothing could test or maintain
that miraculous moment of clairvoyance. The only
sphere in which clairvoyance is normal is the sphere
of mental discourse, one part of which may survey
another in the very terms in which the other unrolled
itself in act ; as I may faithfully rehearse my own
past or future thinkings, or those of men of my own
mind. The probability of such clairvoyance diminishes
as the similarity of structure and substance between
me and the other creature diminishes ; and it vanishes
altogether where life dies down ; so that in respect
to inorganic substance I am indeed reduced to arbitrary
symbols, at which that substance, if it could know
them, would laugh. Yet for my purposes in studying
inorganic substance (which is not interesting to me
in itself) these symbols do very well : they arise on
occasion of substantial events, and therefore appear
in the same historical sequence ; so that in surveying
the order of my symbols I learn the order of real
events, though my pictures certainly are not portraits
of their substance. Yet even the pictorial quality of
these symbols expresses true variations and variety
in the substance of myself : it falls and rises with
my life. For this reason the map I draw of the
universe in my fancy, when I grow studious, becomes
a truer and truer map, rendering the movement of
substance within and without me with increasing
precision, though always in an original notation,
native to my senses and intellect.

208 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

False ideals of knowledge are also involved in the
contention that the hypothesis of substance does not
help to explain appearances, and even renders appear
ances inexplicable. What is explanation ? In dia
lectic it is the utterance, in further words or images,
of relations and terms implied in a given essence : it
is the explication of meanings. But facts have no
meaning in that sense. Essences implied ideally in
their essences need never become facts too : otherwise
the whole realm of essence would have to exist in act,
and it would be impossible so much as to begin the
survey of that horrible infinitude, for lack of any
principle of emphasis to give me a starting-point, and
create a particular perspective. No : facts are surds,
they exemplify fragments of the realm of essence
chosen for no reason : for if a will or reason choosing
anything (say the good) were admitted, that will or
reason would itself be a groundless fact, and an absolute
accident. Existence (as the least insight into essence
shows) is necessarily irrational and inexplicable. It
cannot, therefore, contain any principle of explanation
a priori ; and substance, as I understand the term,
being what exists in itself, it must be also (to borrow
the rest of Spinoza's definition of it) what is under
stood through itself, that is, by taking its own acci
dental nature as the standard for all explanations. If
substance were some metaphysical principle, some
dialectical or moral force, it might be expected to
" explain " existence as a whole ; but it ought not
then to be called a substance ; at best it would be
a harmony or music which things somehow made.
Such a harmony would not exist in things bodily and
individually, rendering their essences existential, but
would supervene upon them and float through them,
like those principles which certain moody meta
physicians have dreamt of, as solving the riddle of the
universe, and have called Sin, Will, Duty, the Good,

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 209

or the Idea. Substance, as I understand the word, is
nothing of that sort. It is not metaphysical, but
simply whatever the physical substance may be which
is found in things or between them. It therefore
cannot "explain" these things, since they are its parts
or instances, and it is simply their substance. They
have one, since they may be cut up, ground into
powder, dissolved into gases, or caused to condense
again before our eyes ; and if they are living things,
we may observe them devouring and generating one
another, the flux of substance evidently running
through them, and taking on recurrent forms. When
these habits of nature are taken (as they should be
taken) as the true principle of explanation, the belief
in substance does become a great means of under
standing events. It helps me to explain their place,
date, quality, and quantity, so that I am able to expect
or even to produce them, when the right substances
are at hand. If they were detached facts, not forms
regularly taken on by enduring and pervasive sub
stances, there would be no knowing when, where, of
what sort, or in what numbers they would not assault
me ; and my life would not seem life in a tractable
world, but an inexplicable nightmare.

I shall be thought a silly philosopher to mention
this, as if it were not obvious ; but why do so many
wise philosophers ignore it, and defend systems which
contradict it ?

Finally, even if, in a moment of candour, the friend
of phenomena was inclined to allow that substance,
so understood, was neither metaphysical nor un-
discoverable nor useless for explaining events, he
might still urge that the belief in substance creates
an insoluble difficulty, because opposite to substance
appearance rises at once like a ghost ; and how shall
this ghost be laid or what room shall be found for it
in the world of substance which we have posited ?

P

210 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

In other words, substance, by hypothesis, is the source
of appearances : but how, remaining substance, can
it ever produce them ?

Here again the objection arises out of false demands.
As at first substance was condemned on the ground
that knowledge should possess its object as intuition
does its data (a demand which would rob knowledge
of all transitive force), so now substance is condemned
on the ground that causation should be dialectical and
that reality should be uniform, so that if substance
exists nothing should exist except substance. Whence
these absurd postulates ? In the first place, reality
(since it includes the realm of essence) is infinitely
omnimodal ; and even when reduced to existence it
may certainly take on as many dimensions and as
many varieties as it likes. Substance is not more real
than appearance, nor appearance more real than
essence, but only differently real. When the word
reality is used invidiously or eulogistically, it is merely
in view of the special sort of reality which the speaker
expects or desires to find in a particular instance. So
when the starving gymnosophist takes a rope for a
serpent, he misses the reality of that, which is lifeless
matter ; when the tourist gazing at an Arabic scroll
calls it a frieze, he misses the reality of that, which is
a pious sentiment ; and when the millionaire buys a
picture for its antiquity and its reputation, he misses
the reality of that, which is a composition. W7hen
substance is asserted, appearance is not denied ; its
actuality is not diminished, but a significance is added
to it which, as a bare datum, it could not have.

In the second place, in so far as causation is not
sheer magic imputed by laying a superstitious emphasis
on those phases which interest me most in the flux of
things, causation is the order of generation in nature :
whatsoever grows out of a certain conjunction in things,
and only out of that conjunction, may be said to be

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 211

caused by it. Nothing that happens is groundless,
since whatever antecedents it actually has are adequate
to produce it. Yet all that happens is marvellous,
because like existence itself it is unfathomable, and, if
we abstract from our familiarity with it, almost in
credible. But the antecedents, the consequents, and
the connection between them are equally remarkable
in this respect, and equally perspicuous. The school
boy will be delighted to learn how the refraction of
the sun's rays paints the rainbow on a shower, or on
the spray of the waves ; the farmer will perfectly
understand that chickens are hatched from eggs ; and
I for one (though other philosophers are less fortunate)
can perceive clearly that when animals react upon
things in certain ways these things appear to them in
certain forms ; and the fact that they appear does not
seem to me (so simple am I) to militate against their
substantial existence.

Certainly neither the awakening of intuition, nor
the character of the essences that appear, can be
deduced dialectically from the state of the substance
which produces them ; but dialectic traces the im
plication of one essence in another and can never issue
from the eternal world. It is perfectly impotent to
express, much less to explain, any change or any
existence. If dialectic ruled the world, all implica
tions would always have been realised, no movement
would have been possible, and the very discourse that
pursues dialectic would have been congealed and
identified from the beginning with the essence which
it describes. Existence, change, life, appearance,
must be understood to be unintelligible : on any other
assumption the philosopher might as well tear his hair
and go mad at once. But when that assumption has
been duly made, and dialectic has been relegated to
an innocuous dignity, the blossoming of substance
into appearance becomes the most amiable of mysteries.

212 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

If instead of admitting this evident and familiar
kindling of mind in nature, which makes the charm
of childhood, of morning, and of spring, I supposed
that mind could animate no material body, and that
the flame of spirit could rise from no natural hearth,
I should not have a more intelligible world on my
hands, but only a very miserable and ghostly one. I
should be foolishly shutting myself up in myopic
ignorance of that great world which is not mine nor
like me, although I belong to it and feed on it un
awares. Why should I think it philosophical to be
so unintelligent, or to assert that appearances are the
only possible realities, when these appearances them
selves do their very best to inform me of the opposite ?
For though the poor things can't be actually more than
they are, they arrange themselves and troop together
in such a manner that, if I make the least beginning
in understanding them, I gather that they are voices
of self-evolving things, on the same plane of reality
as myself. Indeed, without such a background to
lend them a subterranean influence over my own being,
they wrould be unmeaning creations, and every transi
tion from one to another of them would be arbitrary.
If I am told that appearances are but loosely and un
intelligibly bound to substance, I may reply that
without substance appearances would be far more
loosely and unintelligibly bound to one another.
Appearances are at least conventional transcripts of
facts ; they are expressions of substance which may
serve as signs of its movements ; but what relation,
moral or habitual, would each appearance, if taken
absolutely and not as significant of things, retain to
the other appearances that in dreaming or waking
might follow upon it ? None whatever : it is only
in its organs and its objects that experience touches
anything continuous or measurable and possesses a
background on which to piece together the broken

OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE 213

segments of its own orbit. That substance should be
capable of attaining to expression in appearance is a
proof that substance is fertile, not that it is superfluous.
On the contrary, it is certain that if I knew the essence
of substance, and if I made nature the standard of
natural necessity, the emergence of appearance in the
form and on the occasions in which it emerges would
seem to me necessary and inevitable.

CHAPTER XXI

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH

ANIMAL faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit,
shock, or fear, is directed upon things ; that is, it
assumes the existence of alien self-developing beings,
independent of knowledge, but capable of being
affected by action. While things are running on in
the dark, they may be suddenly seized, appropriated,
or destroyed. In other words, animal faith posits
substances, and indicates their locus in the field of
action of which the animal occupies the centre. Being
faith in action and inspired by action, it logically pre
supposes that the agent is a substance himself, that
can act on other things and be affected by them ;
although temporally the substantial existence of the
self may not be posited until later, as one of the things
in the world of things. Meantime in this animal
faith, and even in the choice of one essence rather
than another to be presented to intuition, spirit suffers
violence, since spirit is inherently addressed to every
thing impartially and is always, in its own principle,
ready to be omniscient and just. For by spirit I
understand simply the pure light or actuality of
thought, common to all intuitions, in which essences
are bathed if they are given. At first, as we see in
children, spirit is carried away by the joy of doing or
seeing anything ; it adopts any passion unquestion-
ingly, not being a respecter of persons nor at all

214

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 215

squeamish ; it is innocently happy in accepting any
task and watching any world, if the body welcomes it.
Ultimately, however, the spirit may come to wonder
why it regards all things from the point of view of one
body in particular, which seems to have no pre
rogative over the others in their common realm.
Justice and charity will then seem to lie in rescinding
this illegitimate pre-eminence of one's own body : and
it may come to be an ideal of the spirit, not only to
extend its view over all time and all existence, but to
exchange its accidental point of view for every other,
and adopt every insight and every interest : an effort
which, by a curious irony, might end in abolishing
all interests and all views.

Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal
life, and incidentally to the animal faith on which the
recognition of existing things hangs in the first place.
If the qualms and ambitions of spirit prevailed in any
body altogether, as they tend to do in the saint and
even in the philosopher, he would not be able to halt
at the just sympathy by which, preserving animal
faith, he would admit and respect the natural interests
of others as he does his own. He would be hurried
on to rebel against these natural interests in himself,
would call them vain or sinful, since the spirit of itself
could never justify them, and would initiate some
discipline, mortifying the body and transfiguring the
passions, so as to free himself from that ignominy and
bondage. He would not succeed : but for speculative
purposes I will suppose for a moment that he succeeded.
What would occur ? He would be happier fasting
than eating, freezing than loving. Not sharing the
impulses of his body, he would regard it as a ridiculous
mechanism ; and the bodies of others would be
ridiculous mechanisms too, with which he could feel
no sympathy. His sympathy, if it survived at all,
would be sublimated into pity for the spirits chained

216 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

to those bodies by their sin and ignorance, and perhaps
not even struggling to be free, but suffering in those
prisons perpetual pain and dishonour. He might
aspire to save the spirit in others as in himself ; but
hardened to his own animal vicissitudes he would be
steeled to theirs (a result even easier to accomplish),
and would be all scorn and lamentations for the life
of the world.

I suspend all consideration of this moral issue, and
revert to the variations which animal faith may undergo
during this long and always imperfect transformation.

Things when they are posited are known to be
substances. It would be impossible for a child to be
frightened without implicitly believing in a substance
at hand ; and it would be impossible for him to
attempt to frighten other people (as children like to
do in play) without implicitly assuming that he is a
substance himself. But though his assurance of sub
stance, in both cases, is complete, his knowledge of it
is superficial. In conceiving his own nature especially,
he begins building at the wrong end, from the weather
cock down, not from the foundations up. Although
in action he identifies himself with his body, as also
in vanity and all the passions, yet when he asks him
self deliberately what he is, he may be tempted to say
that he is his thoughts. Or, less analytically, he may
feel that he is a soul, a living spiritual power, a deep
will at work in his body and in the world ; and though
what he posits in other things is primarily their physical
presence, he will conceive this substance of theirs,
particularly when they are animals, in the same moral
terms in which he conceives himself. He will imagine
them to be souls, passionate powers, wills guiding
events. He will not think people spirits to the ex
clusion of their bodies, but will conceive their persons
confusedly, as souls inhabiting and using bodies, or
as bodies breaking out into some thought or passion

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 217

which, once existing, agitates and governs the body
that bred it.

Such a thought or passion, while evidently animat
ing the body and expressing its situation, does not
exactly lie within the body ; to localise it there with
any literalness or precision is absurd ; and a man feels
in his own case that his thoughts and passions come
into his heart, that they are influences visiting him,
perhaps demons or obsessions. He thinks they may
pass from one man to another, or perhaps exist sus
pended and ambient, in the form of gods or mighty
laws. Hence the notion of spiritual substances ; a
self-contradictory notion at bottom, because substance
is a material and spirit is an entelechy, or perfection
of function realised ; so that (if I may parody Aristotle),
if a candle were a living being, wax would be its sub
stance and light its spirit. Nevertheless, in the history
of philosophy, and even in current discourse, the
notion of spiritual substance was unavoidable. In the
haste of practical life, 1 count the lights without
counting the candles. Feelings and thoughts pass for
the principles of action ; I inevitably stop there, and
conceive my enemy as an evil purpose, and my con
tradictor as a false thought. And it is in these imagined
thoughts and purposes that I lodge the power which,
in action, I am contending with : although I should
be truly contending with ghosts, and trying to drive
essences out of the realm of essence (where each is
immovable) if I did not oppose that power or defeat
that purpose in the precise places and bodies in which
it operates. The spirit can be confused with substance
only when it is spirit incarnate. Animal faith could
hardly light on such metaphysical objects unless it
was called forth by a material influence, to which
animal faith is the natural response ; but the mind has
but vague notions of what a material influence can be,
and therefore attributes the substantiality of which it

2i8 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

is intimately aware to hybrid essences floating before
it : hence superstition, myth, metaphysics, and the
materialisation of words.

It is a task for natural philosophy to remove these
ghosts, by discovering the true movement of that
living substance on which animal faith means to be
directed, the substance on which the animal depends
and on which he can act. But the human mind
naturally breathes its own atmosphere of myth and
dialectic, and evidence of fact pierces this atmosphere
with difficulty, only after much experience of error.
Gradually the wiser heads see that all substances fall
together into one system called nature ; and then
various metaphysical substances, which at first seem
to inhabit or compose nature, are discovered to be
modes of the single familiar substance called matter.
The second Book of Realms of Being will be devoted
to this subject ; meantime, I will here draw up a list
of the chief false substances which human faith may
rest on when the characteristic human veil of words
and pictures hides the modes of matter which actually
confront the human race in action, and which there
fore, throughout, are the intended object of its faith.

i. Souls. — These are essentially moral forces, that
is, passions or interests not necessarily self-conscious,
conceived as magically ruling animal bodies and
dictating their acts.

This notion fuses three different things, belonging
to three distinct realms of being. The first is a mode
of matter, the inherited mechanism and life of the
body, which I am calling the psyche. This is a true
dynamic unit, forming and using the outer organs of
the body, a system of habits relatively complete and
self-centred ; but it is only the fine quick organisation
within the material animal, and not a different thing.
This is the original soul which savages conceive as
leaving the body in sleep or death, itself a tenuous

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 219

body of similar aspect and powers ; because they feel
that bodily life and action have a principle which is
not visible on the surface, and yet they have no means
of conceiving this principle except as an image or
ghost of that very body which it is needed to control.
Were wandering souls and ghosts more often met with
and studied, the question of the true souls of these
creatures would present itself anew : for nothing
would be found on the surface of a ghost to explain its
words or its motions, and it would soon be observed
to give up the ghost in its turn. Even in spirit-land
the judicious would have recourse in the end to a
behaviourist psychology. For at the other extreme
of human philosophising, the material psyche re
appears. Observation can trace back motions only
to other motions, and outward actions to activities
hidden within, but essentially no less observable ; so
that the mechanism of the body and its habits are
really the only conceivable mainspring of its behaviour.
The soul again becomes a subtler body within the
body : only that instead of a shadow of the whole
man, even as in life he stood, it is a prodigious net
work of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation
out of a seed.

Habit, though it is a mode of matter, has a unity
or rhythm which reappears in many different in
stances : it is a form not of matter but of behaviour.
Matter makes a vortex which reproduces itself, and
plays as a unit amongst the other vortices near it ;
and the eye can follow the pleasing figures of the
dance, without discerning the atoms or the laws
that compose it. Now the habits of animals exercise
a strong influence, sympathetic or antipathetic, over
the kindred observer. He feels what those habits
seek ; he reads them as purposes, as tendencies, as
efforts hostile or friendly to the free play of his own
habits. The soul agitating those bodies is therefore

220 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

in his eyes more than another ghostly body, which
might quit them ; it is a passion or a will which is
expressed there. And this unit of discourse, which
if actual belongs to the realm of truth, he regards
superstitiously as a substance and a power. He
fancies that he himself is a will and a power reacting
upon other wills and powers : as if these habits or
relations could be prior to the terms that compose
them, or could create those terms. It is this element
in the notion of souls that becomes predominant in the
belief in gods and in devils. Something subjective
and moral, the dramatic value which habits in nature
have for the observer, is projected by him, and con
ceived as a metaphysical power creating those habits.
Passions, in men, are often arrested on words. They
are often arrested, as in poetic love, upon images.
And yet the magic of images and words is vicarious :
they would be empty, did not subtle material influences
flow through them, and hide behind them, rendering
them exciting to the material soul of the observer,
who in his poetic ecstasy may think he is living in a
pure world of discourse.

Finally, in the notion of souls there is a projection
of mental discourse : this, when it really exists in
animals, is a mode of spirit. Animal life sometimes
reaches its entelechy in a stream of intuitions, ex
pressive of its modifications by .the presence of other
bodies, or by the ferments of its own blood. These
modes of spirit are in themselves intangible, un-
observable, volatile, and fugitive ; and if anything
actual, about which truth and error may arise, may
be called unsubstantial, they are as unsubstantial as
possible. But as they arise in the operations of
substance, and are read into these operations when a
sympathetic being observes them, they seem to be a
part of what is observed. But they are in quite
another dimension of being, in the realm of spirit ;

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 221

and spirit, or the intuitions in which it exists, is not
a part of the substance on which animal faith is
directed, nor a mode of it, nor a natural substance at
all. It cannot by any possibility be met with in
action, perceived, fought with, nor (if we consider it
from within, in its own being) can it be lodged any
where in space nor even in time. It belongs to nature
only by its individual outlook and moral relevance :
and we may say of it only by courtesy that it lodges
in the place and time which its organ occupies and in
the world which, by affecting that organ, enters into
its specious perspectives. When a man believes in
another man's thoughts and feelings, his faith is
moral, not animal. Such a spiritual dimension in the
substances on which he is reacting can be revealed
to him only by dramatic imagination ; only his instant
sympathy can shape, or can correct, his notion of
them. In origin, these tertiary qualities of bodies,
imputed to them by literary psychology (which is an
exercise of dramatic insight) are as superstitious and
mythical as the purposes and powers of magical
metaphysics ; but the intuitions assigned to other
people are possible existences, as those metaphysical
chimeras are not ; and when the creature that imputes
the intuitions and the one that has them are the same,
or closely akin and close together, he may be absolutely
clairvoyant in imputing them. The mind as conceived
by literary psychology, or as represented by dramatic
historians, is hypothetical discourse, composed of what
this psychology calls sensations, ideas, and emotions.
It may exist, or may have existed, very much as
conceived ; it would be a substance if idealism were
true ; but in fact it is a translation into moral terms,
rapid, summary, and prophetic, of an animal life going
on very laboriously and persistently in the dark ; and this
animal life is itself no special substance, but a special
mode or vortex in the general substance of nature.

222 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

2. Master-types, or Platonic Ideas. — This is an
assimilation of substances to their names. Words
and grammar are professedly notes indicating the
identities and relations of things ; but in practice
everything, in being expressed, is conventionalised.
The terms of discourse mark only the forms which
things wear on the average, or at their best, or ap
proximately ; and in discourse these conventional
terms soon acquire their own identity and relations,
and form a pattern quite different from that of their
objects. Philosophers, who necessarily employ lan
guage, are like naturalists who should study zoology
only in a farmyard : the jungle would disconcert
them. An argumentative and dialectical mind trusts
its verbal logic : but a logic, however cogent in itself,
is always of problematical application to facts, since
it describes only one possible world out of an infinite
number, and (unless it is secretly founded on observa
tion) is not likely to describe the actual one. The
logicians themselves, when men of open mind, notice
this fact and lament it ; and they bear the actual world
a great grudge for showing so little fidelity to their
principles. It is false, they are convinced, to its true
nature, to the ideal it ought to realise, to the function
which you see at every turn that it is endeavouring
to fulfil. So that the dialectician can easily become
an idealist of the Platonic type, by conceiving that the
substance of things is not the moving matter that
to-day is one thing and to-morrow another, and that
never is anything perfectly, but that this matter is
only what the voice is to a song, or a book to its
message or spirit — a treacherous and subordinate
vehicle of expression ; whereas the true object to look
for, the source of the applicability of words to facts
at all, is the eternal nature which an actual thing may
illustrate : so that the form of things and not their
matter is their true substance or ova la.

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 223

This substantiation of ideals, besides leaning on
language, leans on a sort of pragmatism or utilitarian
ism. Things are called beds if people may sleep
well upon them, and bridles if they serve to rein in
a horse : this function is their essence, in so far as
they are beds or bridles at all, and they are excellent
in proportion to the perfection with which they fulfil
this function. And here an ascetic and supernatural-
istic motive begins to play a part in Platonism. For
since the substance and excellence of things lie
merely in their moral essence, or in the fulfilment of
the function designated by their names, all superfluous
ornaments, all variations, all hybrid combinations are
monstrous. Things should have only the barely
necessary matter in them, and that wholly obedient
to the mastering form. What am I saying ? Need
things have any matter in them at all ? What could
be more ideal than the idea itself, or more perfect than
the function exercised by magic, and without an
instrument ? Away, then, with all material embodi
ments of ideas, even if these embodiments seem perfect
for a moment. Being material, they will be treacherous
and unstable : there will be some alloy of imperfection
in them, some unreality. Fly, then, to the heaven of
ideas, absolute and eternal, as the realm of essence
contains them. There at last you will find the sub
stance which in this world of phenomena you sought
in vain. Things are only appearances ; in minding
and loving them, and thinking they can wound us, we
are befooled ; for the only bread that can feed the
soul is celestial, and the only death that can overtake
her is moral disintegration and the darkness of merely
existing without loyalty to what she ought to be.

This is good ethics : not because our ideal is our
substance nor because our soul in heaven is our true
self, but because life is a harmony in material motions,
reproducing themselves, and happiness is a conscious-

224 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

ness of this harmony ; so that substance would have
no value and its formations no name but for the choice
they make of some eternal essence to embody, and
the purity with which they manifest it. But the
flux of substance is by no means limited to producing
but one type of perfection, or one circle of types.
The infinite is open to all variations ; and any particular
idea is so far from being the substance of things, that
it acquires its ideal prerogative, as a goal of aspiration,
only when substance has blindly chosen it as a practi
cable harmony tending to establish itself and to recur
in the local motions of that substance ; and nowhere
else, and not for a moment longer, does any eternal
essence possess any authority, express any aspiration,
or even seem to exercise any power.

3. Phenomena. — When master-types were regarded
as the true objects of knowledge, the instances of these
types found in the natural world were called their
appearances or phenomena ; but they were not con
ceived to be unsubstantial images, thrown off by the
celestial type impartially into all parts of space, like
rays from a luminary. Phenomena were understood
to be existences, confined to particular places and
times ; indeed, in contrast to the superior sort of
being possessed by the types in heaven, these pheno
mena were existences par excellence : and it was to
them that the philosophy of Heraclitus, that admirable
description of existence, continued to apply. That
phenomena appeared was therefore not the doing of
the types alone : these, from their eternal seats, rained
down influence and, as it were, a perpetual invitation
to things to imitate and to mirror them ; but before
this invitation could be accepted, or this influence
gathered and obeyed, matter must exist variously distri
buted and predisposed ; so that of all the Ideas, equally
radiating virtue, here one and there another might find
expression, and that imperfectly and for a time only.

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 225

Phenomena, then, for Platonism, are simply things :
and they are called appearances not because they are
supposed not to exist except in the mind, but because
they are believed to be copies of an original in heaven
far more ideal and akin to the mind than themselves :
and also perhaps because they are so unstable and
indefinable, that they elude our exact knowledge and
betray our affections.

Phenomena, however, were supposed to be revealed
to us by sense, whereas thought revealed their types :
and this way of putting things has led to a shift in
the meaning of the word phenomenon, so that in
modern times it has been confused with what is called
an idea in the mind. Sense would not reveal pheno
mena in nature (where Plato supposed them to arise)
if sense meant passive intuition. It would then reveal
essences only : that is, just what Plato found thought
to reveal : only that being merely aesthetic intuition,
and not thought about nature and politics and moral
life, the essences revealed would not be Platonic
Ideas ; for these were only such essences as expressed
the categories of Greek speech, the perfections of
animals, or the other forms of the good. But sense,
as opposed to dialectic, meant for the ancients animal
perception and faith : it included understanding,
sagacity, and a belief in matter : indeed, common
speech identified immersion in sense with materialism.
Modern philosophers have conceived sense passively,
as mere sensation or feeling or vision of inert ideas :
and the word phenomenon has sometimes been
attracted into the same subjective vortex, and has
come to mean a datum of intuition. So that pheno
menalism suggests less a belief in the phenomena of
nature than a disbelief in them, and a reduction of all
natural events to images in particular minds.

The other, and proper, meaning of phenomenon
seems to be retained by the positivists, who deprecate

Q

226 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

metaphysics, and even literary psychology, and wish
to be satisfied with the data of science. But why use
the word phenomenon for an event or an existence
that is substantial, and manifests nothing deeper ? Is
it because another substance, not internal to those
events and existences, is supposed to exist somewhere
and to be unknowable ? Or is it because the laws
of nature, raised to a magical authority, are made
manifest or phenomenal in the facts ? Or is it because
the positivists are at heart rather afraid of the psycho
logical critics of knowledge, and by calling things and
events phenomena think that they may pass for critics
themselves, no less prudent and scientific than if they
talked of immediate experience or of ideas in the
mind ? If so, it is a sorry expedient and a poor
defence. If phenomena are essences given in intuition
they are not the objects nor the themes of science,
nor the facts or events in nature : and essences, such
as the absolutely unprejudiced and unpractical mind
may behold them, are the last things on which a
positivist should pin his faith. As to immediate
experience, conceived as an existing process or life,
and as to ideas in the mind, they are names for dis
course — the theme of just that literary psychology
which the positivist disdains. And if phenomena
are simply things, as they were to Plato, the positivist
(who does not regard things as weak efforts of nature
to realise divine Ideas) should not call them pheno
mena, but substances ; unless indeed he is a meta
physician without knowing it, and believes in some
unknowable substance which is not in things.

4. Truth. — Memory presents many a scene which
is not substantial, as is the world before me now :
yet this now is fleeting, and the unsubstantiality which
vitiates the past is in the act of invading the present.
Is not the pre-eminence of the present, then, an
illusion, and is not the reality that panorama which

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 227

all those presents would present when equalised and
seen under the form of eternity ? Is not the invidious
actuality of any part of things a mere appearance, and
is not the substance of them all merely their truth ?

This suggestion of memory is reinforced by the
suggestions of doubt, of disputation, and of information
by hearsay. In our perplexities we seem always to
be appealing to a metaphysical plenum or standard,
which we call the truth : there all facts are not only
evident, but judicial : they settle our quarrels : they
correct our ignorance : they vindicate our faith. To
the discoursing mind, therefore, present things and
material forces may come to seem of little consequence,
negligible and unsubstantial in comparison with the
truth which remains immovable, while things pass
before it like clouds across the constellations.

This is legitimate tragedy : the truth is the realm
of being to which the earnest intellect is addressed.
The senses and passions may feed on matter, and
fancy may sport in the wilderness of essence : to the
earnest intellect the one exercise seems instrumental
and the other wasteful : what concerns it is the truth.
But why is mere experience though it may fall short
of truth, relevant to truth, and helpful in discovering
it ? And why is play of fancy, or definition of mere
essences, not an avenue to truth ? Because the truth,
if not a substance, is a luminous shadow or penumbra
which substance, by its existence and movements,
casts on the field of essence : so that unless a substance
existed which was more physical than truth, truth
itself would have no nucleus, and would fade into
identity with the infinite essence of the non-existent.
The truth, however nobly it may loom before the
scientific intellect, is ontologically something secondary.
Its eternity is but the wake of the ship of time, a furrow
which matter must plough upon the face of essence.
Truth must have a subject-matter, it must be the truth

228 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

about something : and it is the character of this
moving object, lending truth and definition to the
truth itself, that is substantial and fundamental in
the universe. A sign that truth is simply fact, though
described under the form of eternity, is the heat
and haste of men in asserting what they think true.
It is an object of animal faith, not of pure contem
plation.

5. Fact. — Those who appeal to fact with unction
are philosophers justly dissatisfied with theory and
discourse : they are looking in the direction of
substance. Yet in the conception of fact there is an
element of an opposite kind, for fact is supposed to be
obvious as well as fundamental. Not substance, says
the empirical philosopher, which indeed would be
the fact if it existed, but immediate fact, however
unsubstantial, if I can only be sure of it. Un
fortunately, the immediate datum is not a fact at all,
but an essence : and even the intuition of that essence,
which he may say is the fact he means, is only a bit
of discourse or theory : the very thing of which he
was so distrustful, and from which his common sense
was appealing to the facts. The love of fact indeed
has its revenges, and the word comes sometimes to
be used for inarticulate feeling or intuition of the
unutterable — a perfectly possible and rather common
intuition. But at this point a triple confusion perhaps
arises between the given essence of the unutterable,
the incidental intuition of that essence, and the
substance of the natural world which the philosopher
is trying to discover. The unutterableness of the
given essence is absurdly transferred to this substance,
which would need to be no less articulate than appear
ance, if appearance was to arise from it or express it
at all. Such a formless substance is as far as possible
from being the object of animal faith posited in action
and described in perception spontaneously and more

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 229

deliberately in theory and discourse. It is as far as
possible from being a fact. And the intuition (which
is a fact) will yield cold comfort to the philosopher
who wanted " facts " rather than intuitions. The
facts he wanted were things, and he has been looking
for them in the wrong direction.

More often, however, fact is a name for any
pronounced and conspicuous feature of the natural
world, or event assumed to occur in that physical
medium ; so that such a fact may well be a mode of
substance. It obviously could neither arise nor be
discovered except in a context no less substantial than
itself ; for if each fact was a detached existence it
would form a universe by itself, and the eulogistic
title of fact could not belong to it with any better
right than to any intuition. Intuitions, discourse,
theories too, taken bodily, are facts ; but if they had
no locus in nature, they could convey no knowledge
of fact, being insignificant sensations or isolated
worlds, occurring at no assignable time.

Fact, therefore, when honestly pointed to without
metaphysical interpretation, means a thing or an
event against which the speaker has indubitably run
up : as it is a fact that the Atlantic Ocean separates
Europe from America, or that men die. If under
stood not to mean such natural facts, but rather the
impressions or notions of the mind that notes them,
facts become an impossible sublimation of things :
either actual intuitions, revealing not facts but essences :
or alleged intuitions postulated bv literary psychology
(which assumes the natural world, without confessing
it, as the field in which these intuitions are deployed) ;
or finally an undiscoverable atom of sentience cut off
from all relations in a metaphysical void. Such an
atom, although it would be a substance in an absolute
sense, if it existed, yet could neither act nor be acted
upon, and therefore would not be the sort of substance

230 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

that a practical mind, in love with facts, would be
tempted to believe in.

6. Events. — Although things rather than events are
the object of animal faith, ordinarily it is some event
that calls attention to a thing : and it is intelligible
that philosophers, reverting to the study of nature
after their long quarantine in psychological scepticism,
should dare to speak of events as constituting the woof
of nature, before they dare to speak of them as things
in flux or as modes of substance. Yet events can be
nothing less. Events are changes, and change implies
continuity and derivation of event from event : other
wise there might be variety in existence, but there
could be no variation, since the phases of the alleged
changes would not follow one another. This con
tinuity and derivation essential to events suffice to
render them events in substance, or changes in things.
Both the medium of events (requisite to render any
two events successive or contiguous) and the quantita
tive heritage of each (which it derives from the quantity
of its antecedents) are substantial. Not so any event
taken separately, and conceived merely as a passage
of attention from one essence to another : for though
the intuition spanning this transition would be a
fact, neither it nor the terms it played with would be
events. I can imagine an exception to this principle,
if a total event exists including the whole process of
creation. Such a total event (also any minute
irreducible event if such existed) would be actually
identical with a changing thing or a substance in flux.
But every intermediate event would have arbitrary
limits, being composed of minor events and embedded
in greater ones. Perhaps there is no total and no
rudimentary event : the men of science must decide
that point if they can, although I am not confident,
that after they had decided it on the best of evidence,
their decision would prevent the flux of nature from

SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH 231

stopping, if they said it must go on, or from going on,
if they said it must stop. However, the mere possi
bility that there should be no comprehensive and no
least event shows on what slippery ground we stand
if we attempt to make events the ultimate objects of
belief. They are really only half of what changing
existence implies : the other half is substance.

In the effort to halt at events without positing
things there is some vestige of the psychological
confusion which identifies intuition with the essences
present to it. An intuition may present a specious
event : it does not follow that it is an event itself, or
occurs in time. Intuitions would indeed not be
events if they had no locus in physical time, and were
not members of a series of events occurring in quite
another realm of being from the visionary events
which those intuitions might picture. In order to be
events in physical time (even so to speak by marriage)
intuitions must have organs which are parts of the
moving substance of nature. Otherwise they would
be pure spirits, out of time, and out of relation to one
another. They are events only because a natural
event, not an intuition, envelops them and lends them
a natural status. Were they only specious events
present to another intuition they would not be events
at all, but eternal essences contemplated by an eternal
mind.

Nevertheless, the notion of events comes very near
to that of things, as posited and required in action,
and as analysed in physics. The substance of these
things is, by definition, the ground of changing
appearance and the agent in perpetual action : it is
therefore essentially in flux. I cannot say whether
this flux is pervasive, so that nothing whatever in
substance remains for any time unchanged, the constant
element in it being only a constant form or quantity
of change : but on the level and scale of human

232 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

experience, substance is everywhere the substance of
events, not of things immutable. If Heraclitus and
modern physics are right in telling us that the most
stable of the Pyramids is but a mass of events, this
truth about substance does not dissolve substance into
events that happen nowhere and to nothing : that
supposition, on the contrary, would paralyse the
events. If an event is to have individual identity
and a place amongst other events, it must be a change
which substance undergoes in one of its parts. Other
wise, like facts and truths taken hypostatically, events
would be metaphysical abstractions, utterly incom
patible with that natural status which must belong to
the things posited by animal faith in the heat of action
— the only things in which there is any reason for
believing.

CHAPTER XXII

BELIEF IN NATURE

BELIEF in substance, I have seen, is inevitable. The
hungry dog must believe that the bone before him is a
substance, not an essence ; and when he is snapping
at it or gnawing it, that belief rises into conviction,
and he would be a very dishonest dog if, at that
moment, he denied it. For me, too, while I am alive,
it would be dishonest to deny the belief in substance ;
and not merely dishonest, but foolish : because if I
am observant, observation will bring me strong corro
borative evidence for that belief. Observation itself,
of course, assumes a belief in discourse and in experi
ence ; it assumes that I can recognise essences,
remembering their former apparitions and contexts
and comparing the earlier with the present instance
of them, or with the different essences which now
appear instead. When I survey my experience in
this way, the order of appearances, as memory or
presumption sets it before me, will confirm the suasion
which these appearances exercised singly, and will
show me how very well grounded was the instinct
which told me, when I saw some casual essence, that
it was a sign of something happening in an independent,
persisting, self-evolving, indefinitely vast world. If
experience, undergone, imposes belief in substance,
experience studied imposes belief in nature.

The word nature is sometimes written with a

233

234 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

capital, as if nature were some sort of deity or person :
and in ancient philosophy and common speech, powers
and habits are attributed to nature which imply a
certain moral idiosyncrasy in that personage. Poets
also praise nature, and theologians rehearse her
marvellous ways, in order to show that she could not
have fallen into them of her own accord. All this
mythology about nature is natural, and perhaps shows
a better total appreciation of what nature is than
would a precise physics. The precision of physics is
mathematical ; it defines an essence ; and the attribu
tion of this mathematical essence to nature, however
legitimate, is sure to overlook many properties which
belong to her just as truly, and appear in the realms
of truth or of spirit. One such property, at least, is
fundamental, and is better expressed by personifying
nature than by describing her movements mathe
matically, I mean, her constancy, the assumption that
we may trust her to be true to herself. In science,
some observed or some hypothetical process is studied
and the method or law of it is ascertained : but there
is nothing particularly scientific in the presumption
that this process is all that is going on in the given
case, or that it will recur in other cases. What is
called the uniformity of nature is an assumption made,
in respect to the future, without any evidence, and
with proportionately scanty evidence about the past :
where experience confirms it in some particular, the
confirmation itself is good for those instances, up to
that time : it tells me nothing of anything beyond,
or of the future. The source of my confidence is
animal faith, the same that inspires confidence in a
child towards his parents, or towards pet animals ; and
the whole monstrous growth of human religion is an
extension of this sense that nature is a person, or a
set of persons, with constant but malleable characters.
As experience remodels my impulses, I assume that

BELIEF IN NATURE 235

the world will remain amenable to my new ways ;
the convert feels he is saved ; the philosopher thinks
he has found the key to happiness ; the astronomer
tells you he has measured the infinite, and perhaps
rolled it up upon itself, and put it in his pocket.
They all express the infantile conviction that nature
cannot be false to what they have already learned or
instinctively affirmed of it : making nature a single
and quasi - personal entity, bound tragically to its
past, and pledged more or less wilfully to a particular
future. It is this sense that the world, like a person,
has a certain vital unity, and remains constant or at
least consequential in its moral aspects, that is ex
pressed by calling it nature. Like a being born of a
seed, it has a determinate form, and a normal career,
a nature, which it cannot change.

What evidence is there for the existence of nature,
in this sense of the word ? If I speak of the universe
at large, there can be no evidence. Of course the
universe must be what it is, it must have a character,
it must exemplify an essence ; but taken as a whole, it
may be a chaos, in which nothing is predeterminate,
nor progressive, nor persistent, and in which the
parts are self-centred and the events spontaneous.
A philosopher who took his own life as a model for
conceiving all other things, ought perhaps to incline
to this view ; because he is himself, transcendentally
speaking, an absolute centre, and being ignorant of
the sources of his thoughts and actions, may presume
that they have no sources. If under these circum
stances he still has the weakness (for it would be a
weakness) to believe in anything else, say in other
monads, he would doubtless allow them an equal
liberty ; so that in his universe of monads there would
be no common space, no common time, no common
type of character or development, no mutual influence
or kindred destiny. I think the inner life of animals,

236 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

if we treated each as a moral romance, apart from its
physical setting and influence, would actually present
such a chaos : especially if we imagine what may be
the lives of creatures in other parts of the stellar
universe, or out of any relation with ourselves at all.
Such a loose universe could not properly be called
nature. It would not have given us birth, it would
not have nurtured us, it would not surround us with
any constant influences or familiar aspects, it would
not bring any seeds to maturity for our encouragement
or warning.

Evidences for the existence of nature must be
sought elsewhere, in a region which a monadologist
would regard as internal to each monad, in that the
substances posited by me in obedience to my vital
instincts seem to me to behave as if they were parts
of nature. Nature is the great counterpart of art.
What I tuck under my pillow at night, I find there in
the morning. Economy increases my possessions.
People all grow old. Accidents have discoverable
causes. There is a possible distinction between
wisdom and folly. But how should all this be, and
how could experience, or the shocks that punctuate
it, teach me anything to the purpose, or lend me any
assurance in life not merely a reinforced blindness
and madness on my part, unless substances standing
and moving in ordered ways surrounded me, and I
was living in the midst of nature ? Certainly a
partial sceptic like Berkeley, closing one eye in the
interests of a sentimental religion, may conceive that
nature is not a system of evolving substances round
him affecting his own growth, but a perpetual illusion,
like a dream : a story told him in the dark, a con
secutive miracle of grace or of punishment by which a
divine spirit dazzles and conducts his spirit, without
any medium or any occasion. But if this fairy-tale
is to hold good, and to justify the arts of life and

BELIEF IN NATURE 237

maintain the distinction between vice and virtue, I
must be able to discern the ways of Providence in
their routine ; everything will happen exactly as if
nature existed, and unrolled itself in a mechanical,
inexorable, and often shocking way ; my idealism will
merely allow me to admit miracles, and to hope that
to-morrow everything will be well. If I regard the
world of appearance as a mask which the deity wears
inevitably, the very essence of the creator being to
create such a world, the difference between belief in
God and belief in nature will be merely verbal, and I
may say with Spinoza, Deus sive natura. If on the con
trary God is approachable in himself and would prove a
better companion than nature and sweeter to commune
with, why should he terrify me or delude me with
this unworthy disguise ? Why should he have pre
ferred to manifest himself by creating appearances
rather than by creating substances ? What secret
necessity could have compelled him to create anything
at all, or whispered in his ear these irresponsible
designs ? If nature behaves as nature would, is it
not simply nature ? If God were there instead would
he not behave like God ? Or if I say that I have no
right to presume how God should behave, but that
wisdom counsels me to learn his ways by experience,
what difference remains between God and nature,
and are they more than two names for the same thing ?
If by calling nature God or the work of God, or
the language in which God speaks to us, nothing is
meant except that nature is wonderful, unfathomed,
alive, the source of our being, the sanction of morality,
and the dispenser of happiness and misery, there can
be no objection to such alternative terms in the mouth
of poets ; but I think a philosopher should avoid the
ambiguities which a too poetical term often comports.
The word nature is poetical enough : it suggests
sufficiently the generative and controlling function,

238 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

the endless vitality and changeful order of the world
in which I live.

Faith in nature restores in a comprehensive way
that sense of the permanent which is dear to animal
life. The world then becomes a home, and I can
be a philosopher in it. Perhaps nature is not really
constant, nor single ; unless indeed I so stretch and
eviscerate the notions of unity and constancy as to
apply them to the total aspect of nature, under the
form of eternity, however incoherent and loose the
structure of that totality may be. But in this aeon,
in this portion or special plane of space, a sufficient
constancy is discoverable : far greater than my scope
can cover, or my interest require. It is inattention
and prejudice in men, not inconstancy in nature,
that keeps them so ignorant, and the art of government
so chaotic. Whenever a little persistent study of
nature is made (as recently in the interest of mechanical
inventions) rapid progress at once follows in the arts :
and art is the true discoverer, the unimpeachable
witness to the reality of nature. The master of any
art sees nature from the inside, and works with her,
or she in him. Certainly he does not know how he
operates, nor, at bottom, why he should : but no more
does she. His mastery is a part of her innocence.
It happens so, and within limits it prospers. To that
extent he has assurance of power and of support.
It is a faith congruous with his experience that if he
could bend his faculties more accurately to their task,
nature would prove indefinitely tractable : and if a
given animal with special organs and a special form
of imagination can progressively master the world,
the fact proves that the world is con-natural with him.
I do not mean that it favours his endeavours, much
less that it is composed as his fancy pictures it ; I
mean only that his endeavours express one of the for
mations which nature has fallen into, for the time in

BELIEF IN NATURE 239

equilibrium with the surrounding formations ; and
that his ideas too are in correspondence with the sphere
of his motions, and express his real relations. The
possibility of such correspondence and such equi
librium proves that nature exists, and that the creature
that sustains them is a part of nature.

CHAPTER XXIII

EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE

THE sense that nature is animate, and in particular
that men and brutes have feelings and thoughts,
stands in greater need of criticism than of defence. I
assume it before my notions of substance or of nature
are clearly formed, and before I can distinguish
animate from inanimate being. I assume it, not
because it is at all evident or probable in itself, but
because I fetch the materials for all my inchoate
conceptions from my own sensibility : and in discourse
(which I am busy with from the beginning) I un
wittingly interweave the notion of animation in gather
ing my experience of essences and of things. I
attribute an existence to these essences which is
proper only to the light of intuition travelling over
them : and I attribute to these substances moral
attributes and sensuous perspectives also borrowed
from my running discourse. This subjective matrix
and envelope of all my knowledge, though I may
overlook it, underlies knowledge to the end ; so that
I shall never cease to conceive nature as animate and
brutes and men as walking thoughts and passions
until I have advanced very far in scepticism. Even
then, except in deliberate theory, my apprehension
of nature will be fabulous and dramatic ; so that now
that I have officially reinstated my faith in nature,
faith in the animation of nature will tend to slip in

240

ANIMATION IN NATURE 241

unannounced ; somewhat as when an exile is amnestied
or a foreigner naturalised, his parasites (if any) are
silently admitted too. Yet this is not, or need not
be, the law ; and as it is legality in opinion that here
occupies me, I will inquire whether evidence of anima
tion (even supposing that nature is animate in fact)
could by any possibility be found at all ; and having
cleared up that point, I will inquire further under
what control, and with what chances of truth, I may
imaginatively attribute animation to nature in the
absence of all evidence.

Why do I attribute animation to myself, that is,
to my body ? That my spirit discovers a world with
my body in it, is not the question ; the why of that
would be a metaphysical enigma obviously insoluble,
arising out of a trick of thought and inapt application
of categories. The point is why, when I feel a pain,
I suppose that it is my back or my stomach that
aches, and not simply my spirit. I think we may
distinguish two reasons. One is that the pain is an
element in the perception of my back or stomach ; it
is instinct with the loudest and most urgent animal
faith ; and it imperatively summons my attention to
those obscure regions, and makes me wonder what is
happening there. The other reason is that the pain
may be associated with another observed event in
which my body appears as an integral element, as
when my back aches because I am being thrashed.
My nobler thoughts are also known to animate my
body for this external reason. It is my tongue or
gesture that announces them, even to myself. Bad
observers, who suppose themselves to see or to discourse
without intervention of their eyes or larynx, imagine
that they are essentially disembodied spirits, to whom
all things are directly perspicuous, and that only a
hateful invention of philosophers, called introjection
or bifurcation, has put their minds inside their bodies.

R

242 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Whether incarnation is or is not a hateful fatality to
spirit, I will not discuss here ; but that spirit is
incarnate, that it lodges in the body and looks forth
from it on the world, is a fact easily ascertained by
closing the eyes, taking a glass of wine, or blushing
at having made a fool of oneself.

Faith in memory (which is involved in dialectic
and in perception) also reveals to me what animation
means, and obliges me to assert its existence. In
dialectic and in perception I assume that recurrent
views are being taken by me of an object identical
with itself if an essence, or continuous with itself if
a substance. Such recurrent intuitions or mentions
of the terms of discourse are posited in primary
memory, as well as in reversion to the past after an
interval of forgetfulness. This remembrance is remem
brance of animation. It posits thought, cognitive,
synthetic, immaterial ; but it posits it as having
occurred in particular conjunctions at particular times,
in the vicissitudes of a particular body, my own, in a
material world. These alleged past intuitions could
not be kept apart in memory, nor assumed to have
been spaced at longer or shorter intervals of time,
nor to have been enacted in a particular order, unless
they were attributed to the past career of myself,
an animal in the natural world, and grafted upon
recognisable material situations and actions to which
those intuitions were relevant. Nature is the canvas
on which, in memory, I paint the perspective of my
personal experience. Even a fictitious memory, or a
false experience like that of a dream, is recognisable
as having had a natural occasion and date, and as
painting a particular incredible perspective of the
same world. Otherwise, I should not think I was
remembering my past thoughts, but I should be
merely contemplating certain fresh essences.

By animation, then, I understand material life

ANIMATION IN NATURE 243

quickened into intuitions, such as, if rehearsed and
developed pertinently, make up a private experience.
The question whether nature is animate does not
regard its substance, but its moral individuation. In
how many places is experience being gathered ? What
evidence have I that nature thinks and feels, or that
the men and animals think and feel who people
nature ?

I must discard at once, as incompatible with the
least criticism, the notion that nature or certain parts
of nature are known to be animate because they
behave in certain ways. The only behaviour that can
give proof of thinking is thinking itself. If I have ever
conceived intuition or discourse at all, and obtained
assurance of its existence, it has been in my own
person, by knowing what I mean and am meaning,
what I feel and have felt ; and this posited discourse
of mine has assumed, in my estimation, the character
of animation of my body, by virtue of two additional
dogmas which I have accepted : first, the dogma that
I am a substantial being far deeper than my discourse,
a psyche or self ; and second, the dogma that this
substantial being is in dynamic interplay with a whole
environing system of substances on the same plane
with itself. In this way I have come by my initial
instance of animation in nature, on the model of
which I am able to conceive animation in its other
parts.

Now it is obvious that in many parts of nature,
and especially in the language and gestures of men of
my own race, I find a setting for mental discourse
exactly similar to the setting into which I have put
my own intuitive experience ; so that their words and
actions vividly suggest to me my own thoughts. Just
as formerly I incorporated or introjected my thoughts
into my own body, so now I incorporate or introject
them into the bodies moving before me. Imitation

244 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

contributes to this dramatic understanding, because
I am not confined, when I watch other people, to
remembering what I may have felt when I was in
some such situation, or spoke some such words.
Their attitude and language may be novel to me, and,
as we say, a revelation : that is, they may by contagion
arouse unprecedented intuitions in me now, which I
unhesitatingly attribute to them, perhaps with indigna
tion, swearing that such thoughts never could enter
my head, and that I am utterly incapable of such
feelings. Yet this is psychologically false ; because
if I understand a thought, I have it ; though it may
be present as an essence only, without carrying assent.
The irony of the case is that very likely I alone have
it, and not at all the man to whom I attribute it. Even
the closest similarity in language or action is a very
abstract similarity, and the concrete and full current
of our two lives, on which the quality of intuitions
depends, may be quite different. All dramatic under
standing of which I am capable is, by hypothesis, my
discourse. The most contagious feelings, the clearest
thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only because
I can readily make them my own. I cannot conceive
deeper thoughts than my lead can plumb, nor feelings
for which I lack the organ.

Of course by an abuse of language the word
animation might be used to designate certain kinds of
behaviour ; as the ancients said the world was rational
because orderly, or the stars intelligent because they
kept going round in circles. So men or women
might be said to think because they speak or because
they write books ; but it does not follow. The inner
patter of words which I sometimes hear in myself,
and which mystics have called inspiration or (when
explosive) speaking with tongues, is not thinking ;
it is an object of perception that may suggest to me
a subsequent thought, although often I see, when I

ANIMATION IN NATURE 245

try to frame this thought, that those words make
nonsense. It is very true, as I shall find later, that
the fountain of my thoughts, that is, the self who
thinks them, is my psyche, and that movements
there guide my thoughts and render them, as the
case may be, intelligent, confused, rapid, or halting ;
also supply my language, dictate my feelings, and
determine when my thinking shall begin and where
it shall end. But the light of thought is wanting
there, which is the very thinking ; and no fine inspec
tion of behaviour nor interweaving of objects will
ever transmute behaviour into intuition nor objects
into the attention which, falling upon them, turns
them from substances or essences into objects of
actual thought. By animation I understand the in
carnation in nature, when it behaves in these ways,
of a pure and absolute spirit, an imperceptible cognitive
energy, whose essence is intuition.

Animation being essentially imperceptible and not
identical with any habit or act observable in nature,
I see the justification of those philosophers who say
that animals, in so far as science can study them, are
machines ; the discoverable part of them is material
only, just as is the rest of nature. But this conclu
sion being implied only in my transcendental approach
to nature and my knowledge of her, can in no way
prejudge her real constitution, which may be as rich
and superabundant as it likes, without asking my
leave or reporting to me her domestic budget ; nor
is anything thereby prejudged in respect to the nature
or laws of matter, or the simplicity of its mechanism.
Nature seems, at first blush, to have many levels of
habit, irreducible to one another. As it was only the
other day that a hint reached us that gravity and the
first law of motion might be forms of a single principle,
so it may be long before we hear from the biologists
that chemical reaction and animal instinct are forms

246 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

of the same habit in matter. Even if they are irre
ducible to a common principle, they will be two
habits of matter, and nothing more. There is a
sense in which every different manifestation of a
principle makes a different principle of it, as the
language of the United States might be said not to
be English ; but the alienation of form from form is
not a departure from the habit of flux, complication,
dissolution, and temporary arrest which runs through
all language. So nature might be said to have as
many irreducible habits as she has forms ; but she
has an underlying ground of transformation as well,
on which, I suspect, all those forms are grafted, no
more wilfully diverse nor artificially identical than
leaves upon a tree ; and when wiseacres, every day
of every year, bring their ponderous proofs that life
is not mechanical, that the human will, by exception,
is free, and that a single disembodied purpose, by
magic, makes all things dance contrarily to their own
nature, nature and I wink at each other.

The circumstance that animation, by its very
essence, must be imperceptible, and not a link in
any traceable process, renders disproof of animation
anywhere as impossible as proof of it. Those senti
mentalists are short - sighted who in their desire to
show that mind is everywhere, introduce mental
forces or interpolate mental links into their account
of physical economy. If thought was discoverable
only in the gaps between motions, no thoughts would
be discoverable in nature at all. I do not presume to
say that nature can make no leaps ; I leave her to her
own paces ; but I do not conceive that, if she shows
gaps (and what is a gap but a transition ?) I must
hasten to fill them up for her with alleged intuitions.
She may be made up of gaps ; they may be her steps ;
and if her limbs have strength in them for leaping, let
her leap. Her strides are their own measure ; it is

ANIMATION IN NATURE 247

only my ignorance or egotism that can regard any of
her ways as abnormal. Thought in myself has not
appeared when my system has broken down, but
rather when it has established quick connections with
things about it. Thought is not a substitute for
physical force or physical life, but an expression of
them when they are working at their best. If I may
read animation into nature at all, it must be where
her mechanisms are sustained, not where they are
suspended.

There are two stages in the criticism of myth,
or dramatic fancy, or the sort of idealism that sees
purposes and intentions and providential meanings
in everything. The first stage treats them angrily
as superstitions ; the second treats them smilingly as
poetry. I think that most of the specific thoughts
which men attribute to one another are proper only
to the man who attributes them ; and the fabulous
psychology of poets and theologians is easy to deride ;
it has no specific justification, and the moral truth of
it can be felt only by a poetic mind. Nevertheless,
when I consider the inevitable egotism that presides
over the understanding of mind in others, I fear that
I am no less likely to sin through insensibility to the
actual life of nature, because my tight little organs
cannot vibrate to alien harmonies, than I am to sin
through a childish anthropomorphism which makes
not only the beasts but even the clouds and the gods
discourse like myself. After all, in attributing human
thoughts (with a difference) to non-human beings, I
recognise their parity with myself ; my instinct is
courteous or even humble ; and my incapacity to
speak any moral language but my own is not only
inevitable but healthy and manly. Sages and poets
who have known no language but their own have a
richer savour and a deeper wisdom than witlings full
of miscellaneous accomplishments ; and when once

248 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

I have renounced the pedantic demand that poetry
should be prose, I can allow that myth may do the
life of nature less injustice than would the only alter
native open to me, which is silence.

This may be said also about myth regarding myself,
I mean the attempts of memory, self-justifying elo
quence, or psycho-analysis to unfold the riches of my
own mind. How much do I know about my own
animation ? How much is too fluid to be caught in
the sieve of memory, and to be officially assimilated
in verbal soliloquy ? When any one asks me what I
think of the weather or of the Prime Minister, does
my answer report anything that I have previously
thought ? Probably not ; my past impressions are
lost, or obliterated by the very question put to me ;
and I make bold to invent, on the spur of the moment,
a myth about my sentiments on the subject. The
present play of language and fancy may fairly bring to
a head old impressions or ruling impulses ; or I may
have occasion to amend my first expression, and
obeying a fresh suggestion of my fancy I may say :
No, no ; I meant rather this. Whereupon I may
proceed laboriously to create and modulate my opinion,
groping perhaps to a final epigram, which I say
expresses just what I think, although I never thought
it before. Such is my discourse when I am really
thinking ; at other times it is but the echo of language
which I remember to have formerly used, and there
fore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that even
in expressing my own mind when I conceive what
I have felt, I have never really felt just that before.
My report is an honest myth.

The case is even worse as regards the emotions.
What do I mean when I talk of my desires, my
intentions, or the motives of others ? Unless these
things have been actually expressed in words which
I can recover, neither I nor my neighbours have ever

ANIMATION IN NATURE 249

had in mind anything like what I now impute. My
desire, in fact, was only a certain alacrity in doing
things which afterwards I see leading to a certain
issue ; my intention (if actual at all) was a certain
foresight of what the issue might be ; and the motives
I assigned to others were but ulterior events imagined
by me which, if they had actually occurred, I suppose
would have pleased those people. The sensations
or ideas which may really have accompanied their
actions, or the words they may really have pronounced
mentally, are not within my view ; if they were they
would probably go a very little way towards preparing
or covering the actions in question. These actions
would turn out to have had subjectively a totally
different complexion from that which I assign to
them on seeing them performed. The very abundance
and incessant dream-like prolixity of mental discourse
render it elusive ; and the discourse I officially impute
to myself or to others is a subsequent literary fiction,
apt if it suggests the events which the discourse
concerned, or excites the emotions which those events
if witnessed would have produced on an observer of
my disposition, but by no means a fiction patterned
on any actual former experience in anybody. My
sense of animation in nature, and all my notions of
human experience, are dramatic poetry, and nothing
else.

There is therefore no direct evidence of animation
in nature anywhere, but only a strong propensity in
me to imagine nature discoursing as I discourse,
because my apprehension of nature is embedded in
my miscellaneous, serried, and private thoughts, and I
can hardly clear it of the mental elements — emotional,
pictorial, or dramatic — which encrust it there. On
reflection, however, and by an indirect approach, I
can see good reason for believing that some sort of
animation (not at all such animation as my fancy

250 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

attributes to it at first) pervades the organic world ;
because my psyche is animate ; she is the source
and seat, as I have learned to believe, of all my dis
course ; yet she is not different, in any observable
respect, from the psyches of other animals, nor is
she composed of a different sort of substance from
the common earth, light, and air out of which she
has arisen, and by which she is fed ; she is but
one in the countless generations of living creatures.
Accordingly the analogy of nature would suggest that
the other living creatures in the world are animate
too, and discourse privately no less assiduously and
absurdly than I do. It would even suggest that all
the substance of nature is ready to think, if circum
stances allow by presenting something to think about,
and creating the appropriate organ.

The character of this universal animation, or
readiness to think, is inconceivable by me, in so far
as its organs or objects differ from my own. The
forms of it are doubtless as various as the forms of
material being ; a stone will think like me, in so far
as it lives like me. There are actually some men, a
few, who do live like me ; these also think like me ;
and we can truly understand one another and impute
to one another the very thoughts we severally have.
In such rare cases, human discourse in one man
may bring perfect knowledge (though no evidence)
of human discourse in another. In doing the same
things and uttering the same words we have instant
assurance of unanimity, in this case not deceptive ;
especially when it is not the outer stimulus that is
common to us, but the spontaneous reaction. For
this reason gesture or poetry is a better index to
feeling than are events or information coming to men
from outside. What happens to people will never
tell you how they feel ; the alien observer misunder
stands everything ; only he understands a mind who

ANIMATION IN NATURE 251

can share its free and comic expression. For this
reason too psychology is not a science unless it
becomes the science of behaviour, when it ceases to
be an account of mental discourse and traces only
the material life of the psyche. In order to com
municate thought it is necessary to impose it.

Moral communication becomes surer in proportion
as the discourse to be reproduced involves more
articulation, more distinct turns by which fidelity in
the rendering may be controlled. The form of
thought is more easily transferable than its sensuous
elements. Under the same sky, with the same animal
instincts, with the same experience of love, labour,
and war, one race or one age may be totally cut off
from another in spirit. The same language, on the
contrary, the same myths, legends, or histories, may
be carried almost unchanged across seas and ages,
and may unite the happier moments of distant peoples.
The range of such moral unity is also easy to discover ;
I may learn how far languages or religions are diffused ;
they create recognisable moral communities. Indeed,
they tyrannise over society, so social are they ; and
they often render people who share the same spirit
cruel to heretics of their own flesh and blood. The
humanities may prove inhuman ; and the less articu
late, more robust instincts of mankind may take their
revenge by stamping the humanities out. Yet the
barbarians, who are not divided by rival traditions,
fight all the more incessantly for food and space.
Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the
same ideas.

CHAPTER XXIV

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY

SCIENTIFIC psychology is a part of physics, or the
study of nature ; it is the record of how animals act.
Literary psychology is the art of imagining how they
feel and think. Yet this art and that science are
practised together, because one characteristic habit of
man, namely speech, yields the chief terms in which
he can express his thoughts and feelings. Still it is
not the words, any more than the action and attitude
which accompany them, that are his understanding of
the words, or his sense of his attitude and action.
These can evidently be apprehended only dramatically,
by imitative sympathy ; so that literary psychology,
however far scientific psychology may push it back,
always remains in possession of the moral field.

When nature was still regarded as a single animal,
this confusion extended to science as a whole, and
tinctured the observation of nature with some sugges
tion of how a being that so acts must be minded, and
what thoughts and sentiments must animate it. Such
myths cannot be true ; not because nature or its parts
may not be animate in fact, but because there is no
vital analogy between the cosmos and the human
organism ; so that if nature is animate as a whole, or
in her minute or gigantic cycles, animation there is
sure not to resemble human discourse, which is all
we can attribute to her. Myth and natural theology

252

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY 253

are accordingly fabulous essentially and irremediably.
If literary psychology is to interpret the universe at
large, it can be only very cautiously, after I have
explored nature scientifically as far as I can, and am
able to specify the degree of analogy and the process
of concretion that connect my particular life with
the universal flux.

Myth is now extinct (which is a pity) and theology
discredited ; but the same confusion subsists in the
quarters where it is not fashionable to doubt. History,
for instance, is partly a science, since it contains
archaeological and antiquarian lore and a study of
documents ; but it is also, in most historians, an
essay in dramatic art, since it pretends to rehearse the
ideas and feelings of dead men. These would not be
recoverable even if the historian limited himself to
quoting their recorded words, as he would if he was
conscientious ; because even these words are hard to
interpret afterwards, so as to recover the living senti
ment they expressed. At least authentic phrases, like
authentic relics, have an odour of antiquity about
them which helps us to feel transported out of our
selves, even if we are transported in fact only into a
more romantic and visionary stratum of our own being.
Classic historians, however, are not content with
quoting recorded words : they compose speeches for
their characters, under the avowed inspiration of Clio ;
or less honestly, in modern times, they explain how
their heroes felt, or what influences were at work in
the spirit of the age, or what dialectic drove public
opinion from one sentiment to another. All this is
shameless fiction ; and the value of it, when it has a
value, lies exclusively in the eloquence, wisdom, or
incidental information found in the historian. Such
history can with advantage be written in verse, or put
upon the stage ; its virtue is not at all to be true, but
to be well invented.

254 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Philosophy fell into the same snare when in
modern times it ceased to be the art of thinking and
tried to become that impossible thing, the science of
thought. Thought can be found only by being enacted.
I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some
prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience
for a new starting-point or a controlling perception
in my thinking ; but I cannot by any possibility make
experience or mental discourse at large the object of
investigation : it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere.
I can only surmise what it might have been, and
rehearse it imaginatively in my own fancy. It is an
object of literary psychology. The whole of British
and German philosophy is only literature. In its
deepest reaches it simply appeals to what a man says
to himself when he surveys his adventures, re-pictures
his perspectives, analyses his curious ideas, guesses at
their origin, and imagines the varied experience which
he would like to possess, cumulative and dramatically
unified. The universe is a novel of which the ego
is the hero ; and the sweep of the fiction (when
the ego is learned and omnivorous) does not con
tradict its poetic essence. The composition is perhaps
pedantic, or jejune, or overloaded ; but on the other
hand it is sometimes most honest and appealing,
like the autobiography of a saint ; and taken as the
confessions of a romantic scepticism trying to shake
itself loose from the harness of convention and of
words, it may have a great dramatic interest and
profundity. But not one term, not one conclusion in
it has the least scientific value, and it is only when
this philosophy is good literature that it is good for
anything.

The literary character of such accounts of experi
ence would perhaps have been more frankly avowed
if the interest guiding them had been truly psycho
logical, like that of pure dramatic poetry or fiction.

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY 255

What kept philosophers at this task — often quite
unsuited to their powers — was anxiety about the
validity of knowledge in physics or in theology. They
thought that by imagining how their ideas might have
grown up they could confirm themselves in their faith
or in their scepticism. Practising literary psychology
with this motive, they did not practise it freely or
sympathetically ; they missed, in particular, the decided
dominance of the passions over the fancy, and the
nebulous and volatile nature of fancy itself. For this
reason the poets and novelists are often better psycho
logists than the philosophers. But the most pertinent
effect of this appeal of science to a romantic psycho
logy was the hypostasis of an imagined experience, as if
experience could go on in a void without any material
organs or occasions, and as if its entire course could
be known by miracle, as the experiences of the char
acters in a novel are known to the author.

Criticism of knowledge is thus based on the amazing
assumption that a man can have an experience which
is past, or which was never his own. Although criti
cism can have no first principle, I have endeavoured in
this book to show how, if genuinely and impartially
sceptical, it may retreat to the actual datum and find
there some obvious essence, necessarily without any
given place, date, or inherence in any mind. But
from such a datum it would not be easy to pass to
belief in anything ; and if the leap was finally taken,
it would be confessedly at the instance of animal
faith, and in the direction of vulgar and materialistic
convictions. Modern critics of knowledge have had
more romantic prepossessions. Often they were not
really critics, saying It seems, but rebels saying /
find, I know, or empiricists saying Everybody finds,
Everybody knows. Their alleged criticism of science
is pure literary psychology, gossip, and story-telling.
They are miraculously informed that there are many

256 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

minds, and that these all have a conventional experi
ence. What this experience contains, they think is
easily stated. You have but to ask a friend, or make
an experiment, or imagine how you would feel in
another man's place. So confident is this social
convention, that the natural world in which these
experiences are reported to occur, and the assumed
existence of which renders them imaginable, may be
theoretically resolved into a picture contained in them.
Thus the ground is removed which sustained all this
literary psychology and suggested the existence of
minds and their known experience at all ; yet the
groundless belief in these minds, and in copious
knowledge of their fortunes, is retained as obvious ;
and this novelesque universe is called the region
of facts, or of immediate experience, or of radical
empiricism. Literary psychology thus becomes a
metaphysics for novelists. It supplies one of the many
thinkable systems of the universe, though a fantastic
one ; and I shall return to it, under the name of
psychologism, when considering the realm of matter.
Here I am concerned only with the evidence that such
masses of experience exist or are open to my inspection.
No inspection is competent to discover anything
but an essence ; what social intuition touches is
therefore always a dramatic illusion of life in others
or in myself, never the actual experience that may have
unfolded itself elsewhere as a matter of fact. Yet this
dramatic illusion, like any given essence, may be a true
symbol for the material events upon which the psyche
is then directed ; in this case, the life of other people,
or my own past life, as scientific psychology might
describe it. A good literary psychologist, who can
read people's minds intuitively, is likely to anticipate
their conduct correctly. His psychological imagina
tion is not a link in this practical sagacity but a symptom
of it, a poetic by-product of fineness in instinct and

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY 257

in perception. Slight indications in the attitude or
temper of the persons observed, much more than their
words, will suggest to the sympathetic instinct of the
observer what those persons are in the habit of doing,
or are inclined to do ; and the stock idea assigned to
them, or the stock passion attributed to them, will be
but a sign in the observer's discourse for that true
observation. I watch a pair of lovers ; and it requires
no preternatural insight for me to see whether the
love is genuine, whether it is mutual, whether it is
waxing or waning, irritable or confident, sensual or
friendly. I may make it the nucleus of a little novel
in my own mind ; and it will be a question of my
private fancy and literary gift whether I can evolve
language and turns of sentiment capable of expressing
all the latent dispositions which the behaviour of
those lovers, unconscious of my observation, suggested
to me. Have I read their minds ? Have I divined
their fate ? It is not probable ; and yet it is infinitely
probable that minds and fates were really evolving
there, not genetically far removed from those which
I have imagined.

The only facts observable by the psychologist are
physical facts, and the only events that can test the
accuracy of his theories are material events ; he is
therefore in those respects simply a scientific psy
chologist, even if his studies are casual and desultory.
Whence, then, his literary atmosphere ? For there is
not only the medium of words which intervenes in
any science, but the ulterior sympathetic echo of
feelings truly felt and thoughts truly rehearsed and
intended. I reply that whereas scientific psychology
is addressed to the bodies and the material events
composing the animate world, literary psychology
restores the essences intervening in the perception
of those material events, and re-echoes the intuitions
aroused in those bodies. This visionary stratum is

s

258 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

the true immediate as well as the imagined ultimate.
Even in the simplest perceptions on which scientific
psychology, or any natural science, can be based,
there is an essence present which only poetry can
describe or sympathy conceive. Schoolroom experi
ments in optics, for instance, are initially a play of
intuitions, and exciting in that capacity ; I see, and
am confident and pleased that others see with me,
this colour of an after-image, this straight stick bent
at the surface of the water, the spokes of this wheel
vanishing as it turns. For science, these given essences
are only stepping-stones to the conditions under
which they arise, and their proper aesthetic nature,
which is trivial in itself, is forgotten in the curious
knowledge I may acquire concerning light and per
spective and refraction and the structure of the eye.
Yet in that vast, vibrating, merciless realm of matter
I am, as it were, a stranger on his travels. The
adventure is exhilarating, and may be profitable, but
it is endless and, in a sense, disappointing ; it takes
me far from home. I may seem to myself to have
gained the whole world and lost my own soul. Of
course I am still at liberty to revert in a lyrical moment
to the immediate, to the intuitions of my childish
senses ; yet for an intelligent being such a reversion
is a sort of gran rifinto in the life of mind, a collapse
into lotus-eating and dreaming. It is here that the
Muses come to the rescue, with their dramatic and
epic poetry, their constructive music, and their literary
psychology. Knowledge of nature and experience of
life are presupposed ; but as at first, in the beginnings
of science, intuition was but a sign for material facts
to be discovered, so now all material facts are but a
pedestal for images of other intuitions. The poet
feels the rush of emotion on the other side of the
deployed events ; he wraps them in an atmosphere of
immediacy, luminous or thunderous ; and his spirit,

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY 259

that piped so thin a treble in its solitude, begins to
sing in chorus. Literary psychology pierces to the
light, to the shimmer of passion and fancy, behind the
body of nature, like Dante issuing from the bowels of
the earth at the antipodes, and again seeing the stars.

Such a poetic interpretation of natural things has
a double dignity not found in sensuous intuitions
antecedent to any knowledge of the world. It has
the dignity of virtual truth, because there are really
intuitions in men and animals, varying with their
fortunes, often much grander and sweeter than any
that could come to me. The literary psychologist is
like some antiquary rummaging in an old curiosity
shop, who should find the score of some ancient
composition, in its rude notation, and should sit down
at a wheezy clavichord and spell out the melody,
wondering at the depth of soul in that archaic art, so
long buried, and now so feebly revealed. This curious
music, he will say to himself, was mighty and glorious
in its day ; this moonlight was once noon. There is
no illusion in this belief in life long past or far distant ;
on the contrary, the sentimentalist errs by defect of
imagination, not by excess of it, and his pale water-
colours do no justice to the rugged facts. The other
merit that dignifies intuitions mediated by knowledge
of things, is that they release capabilities in one's own
soul which one's personal fortunes may have left
undeveloped. This makes the mainspring of fiction,
and its popular charm. The illusion of projecting
one's own thoughts into remote or imaginary characters
is only half an illusion : these thoughts were never
there, but they were always here, or knocking at the
gate ; and there is an indirect victory in reaching
and positing elsewhere, in an explicit form, the life
which accident denied me, and thereby enjoying it
sub rosa in spite of fate. And there are many ex
periences which are only tolerable in this dream-like

260 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

form, when their consequences are negligible and
their vehemence is relieved by the distance at which
they appear, and by the show they make. Thus both
the truth and the illusion of literary psychology are
blessings : the truth by revealing the minds of others,
and the illusion by expanding one's own mind.

These imaginative blessings, however, are some
times despised, and philosophers, when they suspect
that they have no evidence for their psychological facts,
or become aware of their literary flavour, sometimes
turn away from this conventional miscellany of experi
ence, and ask what is the substantial texture of ex
perience beneath. Suppose I strain my introspection
in the hope of discovering it ; the picture (for such
a method can never yield anything but pictures) may
be transformed in two ways, to which two schools of
recent literary psychology are respectively wedded.
One transformation turns experience, intensely gaped
at, into a mere strain, a mere sense of duration or
tension ; the other transformation unravels experience
into an endless labyrinth of dreams. In the one case,
experience loses its articulation to the extent of becom
ing a dumb feeling ; and it is hard to see how, if one
dumb undifferentiated feeling is the only reality, the
illusion of many events and the intuition of many
pictures could be grafted upon it. In the other
case experience increases its articulation to the extent
of becoming a chaos ; and the sensitive psychology
that dips into these subterranean dreams needs, and
easily invents, guiding principles by which to classify
them. Especially it reverts to sexual and other animal
instincts, thus grafting literary psychology (which in
this field is called psycho-analysis) again on natural
substance and the life of animals, as scientific psy
chology may report it.

This natural setting restores literary psychology
to its normal status ; it is no longer a chimerical

LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY 261

metaphysics, but an imaginative version, like a historical
novel, of the animation that nature, in some particular
regions, may actually have possessed. The fineness
and complexity of mental discourse within us may
well be greater than we can easily remember or describe ;
and there is piety as well as ingenuity in rescuing
some part of it from oblivion. But here, as elsewhere,
myth is at work. We make a romance of our inco
herence, and compose new unities in the effort to
disentangle those we are accustomed to, and find their
elements. Discourse is not a chemical compound ;
its past formations are not embedded in its present
one. It is a life with much iteration in it, much
recapitulation, as well as much hopeless loss and
forgetfulness. As the loom shifts, or gets out of
order, the woof is recomposed or destroyed. It is a
living, a perpetual creation ; and the very fatality
that forces me, in conceiving my own past or future,
or the animation of nature at large, to imagine that
object afresh, with my present vital resources and on
the scale and in the style of my present discourse —
this very fatality, I say, reveals to me the nature of
discourse everywhere, that it is poetry. But it is
poetry about facts, or means to be ; and I need not
fear to be too eloquent in expressing my forgotten
sentiments, or the unknown sentiments of others.
Very likely those sentiments, when living, were more
eloquent than I am now.

CHAPTER XXV

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH

FROM the beginning of discourse there is a subtle
reality posited which is not a thing : I mean the truth.
If intuition of essence exists anywhere without dis
course, the being of truth need not be posited there,
because intuition of itself is intransitive, and having
no object other than the datum, can be neither true
nor false. Every essence picked up by intuition is
equally real in its own sphere ; and every degree of
articulation reached in intuition defines one of a
series of essences, each contained in or containing its
neighbour, and each equally central in that infinite
progression. The central one, for apprehension, is
the one that happens to appear at that moment.
Therefore in pure intuition there is no fear of picking
up the wrong thing, as if the object were a designated
existence in the natural world ; and therefore the
being of truth is not broached in pure intuition.

Truth is not broached even in pure dialectic,
which is only the apprehension of a system of essences
so complex and finely articulated, perhaps, as to tax
human attention, or outrun it if unaided by some
artifice of notation, but essentially only an essence
like any other. Truth, therefore, is as irrelevant to
dialectic as to merely aesthetic intuition. Logic and
mathematics are not true inherently, however cogent
or extensive. They are ideal constructions based on

262

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH 263

ideal axioms ; and the question of truth or falsity
does not arise in respect to them unless the dialectic
is asserted to apply to the natural world, or perhaps
when a dispute comes up as to the precise essence
signified by some word, such as, for instance, infinity.

When men first invented language and other
symbols, or fixed in reflection the master-images of
their dreams and thoughts, it seemed to them that
they were discovering parts of nature, and that even
in those developments they must be either right or
wrong. There was a true name for every object, a
part of its nature. There was a true logic, and a true
ethics, and a true religion. Certainly in so far as
these mixed disciplines were assertions about alleged
facts, they were either right or wrong ; but in so far
as they were systems of essences, woven together in
fancy to express the instincts of the mind, they were
only more or less expressive and fortunate and har
monious, but not at all true or false. Dialectic, though
so fine-spun and sustained, is really a more primitive,
a more dream -like, exercise of intuition than are
animal faith and natural science. It is more spon
taneous and less responsible, less controlled by
secondary considerations, as poetry is in contrast with
prose. If only the animals had a language, or some
other fixed symbols to develop in thought, I should
be inclined to believe them the greatest of dialecticians
and the greatest of poets. But as they seem not to
speak, and there is no ground for supposing that they
rehearse their feelings reflectively in discourse, I will
suppose them to be very empty-headed when they
are not very busy ; but I may be doing them an
injustice. In any case their dreams would not
suggest to them the being of truth ; and even their
external experience may hardly do so.

It might seem, perhaps, that truth must be en
visaged even by the animals in action, when things

264 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

are posited ; especially as uncertainty and change of
tactics and purpose are often visible in their attitudes.
Certainly truth is there, if the thing pursued is such
as the animal presumes it to be ; and in searching
for it in the right quarter and finding it, he enacts a
true belief and a true perception, even if he does not
realise them spiritually. What he realises spiritually,
I suppose, is the pressure of the situation in which
he finds himself, and the changes in his object ; but
that his belief from moment to moment was right or
wrong he probably never notices. Truth would then
not come within his purview, nor be distinguished
amongst his interests. He would want to be successful,
not to be right.

So in a man, intent experience, when not reflective,
need not disclose the being of truth. Sometimes, in
a vivid dream, objects suffer a transformation to
which I eagerly adapt myself, changing my feelings
and actions with complete confidence in the new
facts ; and I never ask myself which view was true,
and which action appropriate. I live on in perfect
faith, never questioning the present circumstances as
they appear, nor do I follow my present policy with
less assurance than I did the opposite policy a moment
before. This happens to me in dreams ; but politicians
do the same thing in real life, when the lives of nations
are at stake. In general I think that the impulse of
action is translated into a belief in changed things
long before it reproaches itself with having made any
error about them. The recognition of a truth to be
discerned may thus be avoided ; because although a
belief in things must actually be either true or false,
it is directed upon the present existence and character
of these things, not upon its own truth. The active
object posited alone interests the man of action ; if
he were interested in the rightness of the action, he
would not be a man of action but a philosopher. So

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH 265

long as things continue to be perceived in one form
or another, and can be posited accordingly, the active
impulse is released, and the machine runs on pros
perously until some hitch comes, or some catastrophe.
It is then always the things that are supposed to have
changed, not the forms of folly. Even the most
pungent disappointment, as when a man loses a bet,
is not regarded otherwise than as a misfortune. It
is all the fault of the dice ; they might and ought to
have turned up differently. This, I say to myself, is
an empirical world ; all is novelty in it, and it is luck
and free will that are to blame. My bet was really
right when I made it ; there was no error about the
future then, for I acted according to the future my
fancy painted, which was the only future there was.
My act was a creative act of vitality and courage ;
but afterwards things accountably went wrong, and
betrayed their own promise.

I am confirmed in this surmise about the psychology
of action by the reasoning of empirical and romantic
philosophers, who cling to this instinctive attitude
and deny the being of truth. No substance exists,
according to their view, but only things as they seem
from moment to moment ; so that it is idle to contrast
opinion with truth, seeing that there is nothing, not
even things, except in opinion. They can easily
extend this view to the future of opinion or of experi
ence, and maintain that the future does not exist
except in expectation ; and at a pinch, although the
flesh may rebel against such heroic subjectivism, they
may say that the past, too, exists only in memory,
and that no other past can be thought of or talked
about ; so that there is no truth, other than current
opinion, even about the past. If an opinion about
the past, they say, seems problematical when it stands
alone, we need but corroborate it by another opinion
about the past in order to make it true. In other

266 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

words, though the word truth is familiar to these
philosophers, the idea of it is unintelligible to them,
and absent altogether from their apprehension of the
world.

The experience which perhaps makes even the
empiricist awake to the being of truth, and brings it
home to any energetic man, is the experience of other
people lying. When I am falsely accused, or when
I am represented as thinking what I do not think, I
rebel against that contradiction to my evident self-
knowledge ; and as the other man asserts that the
liar is myself, and a third person might very well
entertain that hypothesis and decide against me, I
learn that a report may fly in the face of the facts.
There is, I then see clearly, a comprehensive standard
description for every fact, which those who report it
as it happened repeat in part, whereas on the contrary
liars contradict it in some particular. And a little
further reflection may convince me that even the liar
must recognise the fact to some extent, else it would
not be that fact that he was misrepresenting ; and also
that honest memory and belief, even when most un
impeachable, are not exhaustive and not themselves
the standard for belief or for memory, since they are
now clearer and now vaguer, and subject to error and
correction. That standard comprehensive description
of any fact which neither I nor any man can ever
wholly repeat, is the truth about it.

The being of truth thus seems to be first clearly
posited in disputation ; and a consequence of this
accident (for it is an accident from the point of view
of the truth itself under what circumstances men
most easily acknowledge its authority) — a consequence
is that truth is often felt to be somehow inseparable
from rival opinions ; so that people say that if there
was no mind and consequently no error there could
be no truth. They mean, I suppose, that nothing

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH 267

can be correct or incorrect except some proposition
or judgement regarding some specific fact ; and that
the same constitution of the fact which renders one
description correct, renders any contradictory descrip
tion erroneous. " Truth " is often used in this
abstract sense for correctness, or the quality which
all correct judgements have in common ; and another
word, perhaps " fact " or " reality," would then have
to be used for that standard comprehensive description
of the object to which correct judgements conform.
But a fact is not a description of itself ; and as to the
I word " reality," if it is understood to mean existence,
it too cannot designate a description, which is an
essence only. Facts are transitory, and any part of
existence to which a definite judgement is addressed
is transitory too ; and when they have lapsed, it is
only their essence that subsists and that, being partially
recovered and assigned to them in a retrospective
judgement, can render this judgement true. Opinions
are true or false by repeating or contradicting some
part of the truth about the facts which they envisage ;
and this truth about the facts is the standard com
prehensive description of them — something in the
realm of essence, but more than the essence of any
fact present within the limits of time and space which
that fact occupies ; for a comprehensive description
includes also all the radiations of that fact — I mean,
all that perspective of the world of facts and of the
realm of essence which is obtained by taking this
fact as a centre and viewing everything else only in
relation with it. The truth about any fact is therefore
infinitely extended, although it grows thinner, so to
speak, as you travel from it to further and further
facts, or to less and less relevant ideas. It is the
splash any fact makes, or the penumbra it spreads,
by dropping through the realm of essence. Evidently
no opinion can embrace it all, or identify itself with it ;

268 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

nor can it be identified with the facts to which it
relates, since they are in flux, and it is eternal.

The word truth ought, I think, to be reserved
for what everybody spontaneously means by it : the
standard comprehensive description of any fact in all
its relations. Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally
true one ; because besides the limitation in scope
which human opinions, at least, can never escape,
even the most complete and accurate opinion would
give precedence to some terms, and have a direction
of survey ; and this direction might be changed or
reversed without lapsing into error ; so that the truth
is the field which various true opinions traverse in
various directions, and no opinion itself. An even
more impressive difference between truth and any
true discourse is that discourse is an event ; it has a
date not that of its subject-matter, even if the subject-
matter be existential and roughly contemporary ; and
in human beings it is conversant almost entirely with
the past only, whereas truth is dateless and absolutely
identical whether the opinions which seek to reproduce
it arise before or after the event which the truth
describes.

The eternity of truth is inherent in it : all truths—
not a few grand ones — are equally eternal. I am
sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have
an unction which prejudices dry minds against it,
and leads fools to use it without understanding. This
unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth
is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its
sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in
the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God.
Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the im
movable standard and silent witness of all our memories
and assertions ; and the past and the future, which
in our anxious life are so differently interesting and
so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH 269

truth, shining like the sun. It is not necessary to
offer any evidence for this eternity of truth, because
truth is not an existence that asks to be believed in,
and that may be denied. It is an essence involved
in positing any fact, in remembering, expecting, or
asserting anything ; and while no truth need be
acknowledged if no existence is believed in, and none
would obtain if there was no existence in fact, yet on
the hypothesis that anything exists, truth has appeared,
since this existence must have one character rather
than another, so that only one description of it in
terms of essence will be complete ; and this complete
description, covering all its relations, will be the truth
about it. No one who understands what is meant by
this eternal being of truth can possibly deny it ; so
that no argument is required to support it, but only
enough intensity of attention to express what we
already believe.

Inspired people, who are too hot to think, often
identify the truth with their own tenets, to signify by
a bold hyperbole how certain they feel in their faith ;
but the effect is rather that they lead foolish people,
who may see that this faith may be false, to suppose
that therefore the truth may be false also. Eternal
truths, in the mouth of both parties, are then tenets
which the remotest ancestors of man are reputed to
have held, and which his remotest descendants are
forbidden to abandon. Of course there are no eternal
tenets : neither the opinions of men, nor mankind,
nor anything existent can be eternal ; eternity is a
property of essences only. Even if all the spirits in
heaven and earth had been so far unanimous on any
point of doctrine, there is no reason, except the
monotony and inertia of nature, why their logic or
religion or morals should not change to-morrow from
top to bottom, if they all suddenly grew wiser or
differently foolish.

270 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

At the risk of being scholastic I will suggest the
uses to which the word eternal and the terms akin
to it might be confined if they were made exact.

A thing that occupied but one point of physical time
would be instantaneous. No essence is instantaneous,
because none occupies any part of physical time or
space ; and I doubt whether any existence is instantane
ous either ; for if the mathematicians decide that the
continuous or extended must be composed of an
infinite number of inextended and non-contiguous
units, in bowing to their authority I should retain a
suspicion that nothing actual is confined to any of
these units, but that the smallest event has duration
and contains an infinite number of such units ; so
that one event (though not one instant) can be con
tiguous to another.

A given essence containing no specious temporal
progression or perspective between its parts would be
timeless. Colour, for instance, or number, is timeless.
The timeless often requires to be abstracted from the
total datum, because round any essence as actually
given there is an atmosphere of duration and persistence,
suggesting the existential flux of nature behind the
essence. Colour seems to shine, that is, to vibrate.
Number seems to mount, and to be built up. The
timeless is therefore better illustrated in objects like
laws or equations or definitions, which though intent
on things in time, select relations amongst them
which are not temporal.

A being that should have no external temporal
relations and no locus in physical time would be
dateless. Thus every given essence and every specious
present is dateless, internally considered, and taken
transcendentally, that is, as a station for viewing other
things or a unit framing them in. Though dateless,
the specious present is not timeless, and an instant,
though timeless, is not dateless.

THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH 271

Whatsoever, having once arisen, never perishes,
would be immortal. I believe there is nothing im
mortal.

Whatsoever exists through a time infinite in both
directions is everlasting. Matter, time, the life of God,
souls as Plato conceived them, and the laws of nature
are commonly believed to be everlasting. In the
nature of the case this can be only a presumption.

That which without existing is contemporary with
all times is eternal. Truth is dateless and eternal,
but not timeless, because, being descriptive of existence,
it is a picture of change. It is frozen history. As
Plato said that time was a moving image of eternity,
we might say that eternity was a synthetic image of
time. But it is much more than that, because, besides
the description of all temporal things in their temporal
relations, it contains everything that is not temporal
at all ; in other words, the whole realm of essence,
as well as the whole realm of truth.

CHAPTER XXVI

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT

Is the existence of spirit evident to spirit, and involved
in the presence of anything ? Is its nature simple and
obvious ? I think there is something of which this
may be said, but not of spirit ; for by spirit I under
stand not only the passive intuition implied in any
essences being given, but also the understanding and
belief that may greet their presence. Even passive
intuition is no datum ; there is nothing evident except
the given essence itself. Yet, as I have seen above,
the mere prolongation of this presence, the recognition
of this essence as identical with itself, and the survey
of its elements in various orders, very soon impose
upon me a distinction between this essence and my
intuition of it. This intuition is a fact and an event,
as the essence cannot be ; so that even if spirit meant
nothing but pure consciousness or the activity of a
transcendental ego, it would need to be posited, in
view of the felt continuity of discourse, and could
not be an element in the given essences. If spirit
were defined as the common quality of all appearances,
distinguishing them from the rest of the realm of
essence which does not appear, spirit would be reduced
to an appearance itself. It would be like light, some
thing seen, a luminousness in all objects, not what I
understand by it, which is the seeing ; not the coloured

272

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 273

lights I may observe, but the exercise of sight as
distinguished from blindness.

The common quality of all appearances is not
spirit but mere Being ; that simple and always obvious
element to which I referred just now as given in all
essences without distinction, and which some philo
sophers and saints have found so unutterably precious.
This is all that is common to all possible appearances,
considered in themselves ; but animal tension is not
altogether absent even in this abstruse contemplation,
and the sense that appearances are assaulting me thickens
my intuition of their essence into an apprehension of
existence, which existence, having no idea of myself,
I of course attribute to them, or to the abstract common
element in their essences, pure Being, which thus
becomes in my eyes absolute existence.

The present stimulus that awakens me out of my
material lethargy and keeps my attention more or less
taut is not spirit, although, of course, the birth of spirit
is involved in my awakening. That stimulus is the
strain and rumble of the universal flux, audible in my
little sea-shell. It preserves the same ground-tone
(that of a disturbance or a strain) no matter what
image it may bring forth, or even if it brings forth no
images but only a pervasive sense of swimming in
safety and bliss. This budding sentiment of existence
is a recognition not of spirit but of substance, of fact,
of force, of an unfathomable mystery.

By spirit I understand the light of discrimination
that marks in that pure Being differences of essence,
of time, of place, of value ; a living light ready to fall
upon things, as they are spread out in their weight
and motion and variety, ready to be lighted up.
Spirit is a fountain of clearness, decidedly wind
blown and spasmodic, and possessing at each moment
the natural and historical actuality of an event, not
the imputed or specious actuality of a datum. Spirit,

274

in a word, is no phenomenon, not sharing the aesthetic
sort of reality proper to essences when given, nor
that other sort proper to dynamic and material things ;
its peculiar sort of reality is to be intelligence in act.
Spirit, or the intuitions in which it is realised, ac
cordingly forms a new realm of being, silently im
plicated in the apparition of essences and in the felt
pressure of nature, but requiring the existence of
nature to create it, and to call up those essences before
it. By spirit essences are transposed into appearances
and things into objects of belief ; and (as if to com
pensate them for that derogation from their native
status) they are raised to a strange actuality in thought
—a moral actuality which in their logical being or
their material flux they had never aspired to have :
like those rustics and servants at an inn whom a
travelling poet may take note of and afterwards, to
their astonishment, may put upon the stage with
applause.

It is implied in these words, when taken as they
are meant, that spirit is not a reality that can be
observed ; it does not figure among the dramatis
personce of the play it witnesses. As the author,
nature, and the actors, things, do not emerge from
the prompter's box, or remove their make-up so as
to exhibit themselves to me in their unvarnished
persons, but are satisfied that I should know them only
as artists (and I for my part am perfectly willing to
stop there in my acquaintance with them) ; so the
spirit in me which their art serves is content not to
be put on the stage ; that would be far from being a
greater honour, or expressing a truer reality, than that
which belongs to it as spectator, virtually addressed
and consulted and required in everything that the
theatre contrives. Spirit can never be observed as an
essence is observed, nor encountered as a thing is
encountered. It must be enacted ; and the essence

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 275

of it (for of course it has an essence) can be described
only circumstantially, and suggested pregnantly. It
is actualised in actualising something else, an image
or a feeling or an intent or a belief ; and it can be
discovered only by implication in all discourse, when
discourse itself has been posited. The witnesses to
the existence of spirit are therefore the same as those
to the existence of discourse ; but when once discourse
is admitted, the existence of spirit in it becomes
self-evident ; because discourse is a perusal of essence,
or its recurring presence to spirit.

Now in discourse there is more than passive in
tuition ; there is intent. This element also implies
spirit, and in spirit as man possesses it intent or in
telligence is almost always the dominant element.
For this reason I shall find it impossible, when I come
to consider the realm of spirit, to identify spirit with
simple awareness, or with consciousness in the abstract
sense of this abused word. Pure awareness or con
sciousness suffices to exemplify spirit ; and there may
be cold spirits somewhere that have merely that
function ; but it is not the only function that only
spirits could perform ; and the human spirit, having
intent, expectation, belief, and eagerness, runs much
thicker than that. Spirit is a category, not an in
dividual being : and just as the realm of essence
contains an infinite number of essences, each different
from the rest, and each nothing but an essence, so
the realm of spirit may contain any number of forms
of spirit, each nothing but a spiritual fact. Spirit is
a fruition, and there are naturally as many qualities
of fruition as there are fruits to ripen. Spirit is
accordingly qualified by the types of life it actualises,
and is individuated by the occasions on which it
actualises them. Each occasion generates an intuition
numerically distinct, and brings to light an essence
qualitatively different.

276 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Let me suppose, by way of illustration, that there
was a disembodied spirit addressed to the realm of
truth in general, and seeing all things under the form
of eternity. This would be a very special kind of
spirit, and many an essence would be excluded from
its intuition ; for instance, the essence of surprise.
No doubt it would congratulate itself on this incapacity,
and say with Aristotle that there are things it is better
not to know than to know, at least by experience.
The essence of surprise involves ignorance of the
future, and it could never be realised, or known by
intuition, in a spirit to whom the future had always
been known : and to know surprise by experience is
the only way of knowing its essence. It might indeed
be known by description, and defined as a feeling which
animals have when they expect one thing and find
another. Such a description may suggest the essence
of surprise to me, who know by intuition what it is to
expect and to find ; but it would never suggest that
essence to a spirit that had only descriptions to go by,
and who could reach a conception of " expecting "
and of " finding " only in symbols that translated their
transitive natures into synthetic pictures. Thus the
essence of surprise would remain for ever excluded
from intuition in a spirit that saw all things under the
form of eternity.

The occasions on which spirit arises in man are
the vicissitudes of his animal life : that is why spirit
in him runs so thick. In intent, in belief, in emotion
a given essence takes on a value which to pure spirit
it could not have. The essence then symbolises an
object to which the animal is tentatively addressed, or
an event through which he has just laboured, or which
he is preparing to meet. This attitude of the animal
may be confined to inner readjustments in the psyche,
not open to gross external observation ; yet it may
all the more directly be raised to consciousness in the

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 277

form of attention, expectation, deliberation, memory,
or desire. These sentiments form a moving but
habitual background for any particular essence con
sidered ; they frame it in, not only pictorially in a
sensuous perspective, but morally, by its ulterior
suggestions, and by the way in which, in surveying
the whole field of intuition, that particular feature in
it is approached or attacked or rejected. In such
settings given essences acquire their felt meanings ;
and if they should be uprooted from that soil and
exhibited in isolation, they would no longer mean
the same thing to the spirit. Like a note in a melody,
or a word in a sentence, they appeared in a field of
essence greater than they ; they were never more
than a term or a feature within it. For this reason
I imagine that I see things and not essences ; the
essences I see incidentally are embedded in the
voluminous ever-present essences of the past, the
world, myself, the future ; master-presences which
express attitudes of mine appropriate not to an essence
—which is given — but to a thing — which though not
given enlists all my conviction and concern.

Thus intelligence in man, being the spiritual
transcript of an animal life, is transitional and im
passioned. It approaches its objects by a massive
attack, groping for them and tentatively spying them
before it discovers them unmistakably. It is energetic
and creative, in the sense of slowly focussing its
object within the field of intuition in the midst of felt
currents with a felt direction, themselves the running
expression of animal endeavours. All this intuition
of turbulence and vitality, which a cold immortal
spirit could never know, fills the spirit of man, and
renders any contemplation of essences in their own
realm only an interlude for him or a sublimation or
an incapacity. It also renders him more conscious
than a purer spirit would be of his own spirit. For

278 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

just as I was able to find evidence of intuition in
discourse, which in the motionless vision of essence
would have eluded me, so in intent, expectation, belief,
and emotion, the being of my thoughts rises up and
almost hides the vision of my object. Although I
myself am a substance in flux, on the same level as
the material thing that confronts me, the essences
that reveal my own being are dramatic and moral,
whereas those that express the thing are sensuous ; and
these dramatic and moral essences, although their
presence involves spirit exactly in the same way, and
no more deeply, than the presence of the sensuous
essences does, yet seem to suggest its presence more
directly and more voluminously.

Hence the popular identification of spirit with the
heart, the breath, the blood, or the brain ; and the
notion that my substantial self and the spirit within
me are identical. In fact, they are the opposite poles
of my being, and I am neither the one nor the other
exclusively. If I am spiritually proud and choose to
identify myself with the spirit, I shall be compelled
to regard my earthly person and my human thoughts
as the most alien and the sorriest of accidents ; and
my surprise and mortification will never cease at the
way in which my body and its world monopolise my
attention. If on the contrary I modestly plead guilty
to being the biped that I seem, I shall be obliged to
take the spirit within me for a divine stranger, in
whose heaven it is not given me to live, but who
miraculously walks in my garden in the cool of the
evening. Yet in reality, incarnation is no anomaly,
and the spirit is no intruder. It is as much at home
in any animal as in any heaven. In me, it takes my
point of view ; it is the voice of my humanity ; and
what other mansions it may have need not trouble me.
Each will provide a suitable shrine for its resident
deity and its native oracle. It is a prejudice to suppose

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 279

that spirit is contaminated by the flesh ; it is generated
there ; and the more varied its instruments and
sources are, the more copiously it will be manifested,
and the more unmistakably.

Spiritual minds are the first to recognise the
empire of the flesh over the spirit in the senses, the
passions, and even in a too vivid imagination ; and
they call these influences the snares of the adversary.
I think they are right in condemning as vain or carnal
any impulses which would disrupt the health of the
soul, either directly in the individual body, or in
directly by loosening such bonds with society as are
requisite for human happiness. I also think, however,
that moralists of this type overlook two considerations
of the greatest moment, by which all the metaphysical
background of their maxims is removed, and what is
reasonable in them is put on a naturalistic basis.
One consideration is that, on a small scale and in its
own key, every impulse in man or beast bears its
little flame of spirit. How much longing, how much
laughter, how much perception, how much policy and
art in those vices and crimes which the moralist
thinks fatal to spirit ! They may render a finer thing
impossible (which the moralist should bethink himself
to depict more attractively), but in themselves they are
full of life and light. For this reason crimes and
vices, together with horrible adventures and the pomps
and vanities of this wicked world, are the chosen
theme of novelists and playwrights ; and the poor
public, having hardly any other intellectual pleasure,
gloats on these fictions, as an imaginative escape from
the moral penury not only of their work, but of their
religion. The poets are far more genuine lovers of
spirit in this than their mentors, whose official morality
is probably quite worldly, and insensible to any
actually spiritual achievement, because such achieve
ments are necessarily fugitive, invisible, and un-

28o SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

productive. The devil was an angel essentially ; it
was only in the complicated politics of this world
that he missed his way, and became an enemy of the
highest good.

The other consideration that is overlooked is that
the spirit which may discern this highest good is
itself a natural passion, and not less an expression of
the flesh — though more justly and broadly — than the
random impulses it condemns. Consider, for instance,
the earnestness with which evil is condemned. If
this evil is pain, the objection to it could not be more
instinctive. Why should pure spirit detest pain ? A
material accident in the body here absorbs my attention,
and strangely persuades me to be utterly rebellious
and impatient at being so absorbed. The psyche, or
the principle of bodily life, is somehow striving against
the event or stimulus which produced the pain (a
perfectly harmless essence to contemplate in itself),
because the psyche is congenitally a system or cycle
of habits which that obnoxious event interrupts. It
is this material pressure and effort not to be stifled
or rent in any of her operations that the psyche imposes
on the spirit, commanding it to pronounce it a terrible
evil that she should be rent or stifled. These strange
and irrational pronouncements of spirit, calling events
good or evil, are accordingly grounded on nothing
but on a creeping or shrinking of the flesh. If the
evil is moral — the eventual defeat of some ideal I
cherish for myself, my children, or my country—
what has fixed this ideal, or declared it to be a good ?
Suppose this ideal is a life glorious and unending ; is
it not obvious that nothing but the momentum of
life, already accidentally working in myself, my
children, or my country, could possibly demand life
or determine what forms of life would be glorious
for us ? I will not pursue this topic : if the reader
does not understand, he probably never will.

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 281

Let me turn to the most intellectual powers of
spirit — attention, synthesis, perception. These too
are voices loudly issuing from the heart of material
existence, and proclaiming their origin there not only
by their occasions and external connections, but by
their inmost moral nature. Why does the spirit stop
to collect or to recollect anything ? Why not range
undisturbed and untrammelled over image after image,
without referring one to another or attempting (always
in vain) to preserve the design of vanished images, or
the order of their appearance, even through the lapse
of the sensible elements that filled them in ? Because
the animal is forming habits. The psyche is plastic ;
no impression can endure unchanged, as if it had been
a substantial little thing in itself, and not a mode, a
ripple, in an inherited, transmissible, ever rejuvenated
substance. Scarcely is the impression received, but
it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness
of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of
reacting on some natural object, an object reported
not by that impression alone, but by many others :
so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most
radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion
peculiar to animal economy, which no pure spirit
would need to share, the compulsion to use things as
materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat
and to digest them : for the drinking in of light
through the eyes, or of currents from other organs,
thereby rearranging the habits of the nervous system,
is very like the consumption of food, restoring the
vegetative functions. Synthesis in thought, correlation,
scope, or (as the phrase is) taking things in, is laborious
piety on the spirit's part in subservience to the flesh.
It is the mental fruit of training, of care : an inner
possession rewarding an outer fidelity.

Pure spirit would never need to apperceive at all ;
this is an animal exigency that distracts it from

282 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

intuition. There is unity in intuition too, of a nebulous
sort, as there must be unity in the universe, since it is
all there is, however loose its structure or unmarked
its limits. Yet in intuition, as in cloud-land, the field
is in the act of changing pervasively ; every part
shifts more or less. Any feature you may distinguish
fades and refashions itself irresponsibly ; and pure
spirit would be perfectly content that it should do so.
Perhaps, if it was a young spirit, it would positively
whip up the hoop, or blow and distend the bubble,
for the fun of seeing it run or burst more gloriously ;
and it would be happy to think there was no harm
done, and nothing left over. The scene would then
be cleared for something utterly fresh. The synthetic
unity of apperception is something imposed by things
on animals, when these things exercise a seductive
charm or threaten mischief. Attention cries halt, it
reconnoitres, it takes note, it throws a lassoo over
the horses of Poseidon, lord of the flux. And why ?
Because the organs of spirit are structures ; they are
mechanisms instituted in nature to keep doing certain
things, roughly appropriate to the environment, itself
roughly constant. It is to this approximate fixity of
function and habit that spirit owes its distinct ideas,
the names it gives to things, and its faith in things,
which is a true revelation of their existence — know
ledge of them stored for use.

Perception, too, would be a miracle and an im
possibility to a spirit conceived as alien to matter.
Perception is a stretching forth of intent beyond
intuition ; it is an exercise of intelligence. Intelligence,
the most ideal function of spirit, is precisely its point
of closest intimacy with matter, of most evident sub
servience to material modes of being. The life of
matter (at least on the human scale, if not at every
depth) is a flux, a passage from this to that, almost
forbidding anything to be simply itself, by immediately

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 283

turning it, in some respect, into something different.
If the psyche were a closed round of motions, the
spirit it generated (if it generated spirit at all) would
certainly not be perceptive or cognitive, but in some
way emotional or musical — the music of those spheres.
But the round of motions which the psyche is actually
wound up to make must be executed in a changeful
and precarious environment, not to speak of changes
in her own substance. She must hunt, fight, find a
mate, protect the offspring, defend the den and
the treasure. Perception, intelligence, knowledge
accurately transcribe this mode of being, profoundly
alien to repose in intuition or to drifting reverie.
Perception points to what it does not, save by pointing,
know to exist ; knowledge is only of the past or the
future, both of which are absent ; and intelligence
talks and talks to an interlocutor — the mind of another
man or god or an eventual self of one's own — whom
it can never see and whose replies, conveyed (if at all)
through material channels, it is never sure exist
morally, or could be understood if they did exist.
There is no dilemma in the choice between animal
faith and reason, because reason is only a form of
animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically,
although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence,
like the chirping of birds. The suasion of sanity is
physical : if you cut your animal traces, you run mad.
It is impossible to say everything at once, and I
have been contrasting intelligence with intuition, as if
intuition were less subject than intelligence to physical
inspiration, or had an independent source. This is
not the case ; intuition is itself pathetically animal.
Why should I have awaked at all ? Can anything,
inwardly considered, be more gratuitous than con
sciousness ? I am afraid I must be constituted
differently from other people, at least in the reflective
faculty, because it astonishes me to hear so many

284 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

philosophers talking of spirit as if its existence ex
plained itself, and denying the possibility of matter ;
whereas to me it seems credible, though certainly
unnecessary a priori, that matter should exist without
being consulted, for it cannot help itself, suffers
nothing, and has no reason to protest ; and its existence
is antecedently just as plausible as its non-existence.
But the existence of spirit really demands an explana
tion ; it is a tremendous paradox to itself, not to say
a crying scandal — I mean from a scientific or logical
point of view, because treated as a family secret the
scandal is often delicious, and privately it is in this
festive and poetic medium that I love to dwell. Spirit,
since it can ask how it came to exist, has a right to
put the question and to look for an answer. And it
may perhaps find an answer of a sort, although not
one which spirit, in all its moods, will think satis
factory.

Fact can never be explained, since only another
fact could explain it : therefore the existence of a
universe rather than no universe, or of one sort of
universe rather than another, must be accepted without
demur. In this very irrationality or contingency of
existence, which is inevitable in any case, I find a
clue to the strange presence of spirit in this world.
Spirit, the wakefulness of attention, could not have
arisen of its own accord ; it contains no bias, no
principle of choice, but is an impartial readiness to
know. It never could have preferred one thing to
another, nor preferred existence for itself to non-
existence, nor vice versa. Attention is not a principle
that can select the themes that shall attract attention :
to select them it must already have thought of them.
As far as its own nature is concerned, attention is
equally ready to fall on the just and on the unjust ;
spirit is equally ready to speak any language, to quicken
any body, and to adopt any interest. An instance of

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 285

spirit cannot be determined by spirit itself either in
its occasion, its intensity, or the aesthetic character
of the essence presented to it. Chance, matter, fate
—some non-spiritual principle or other — must have
determined what the spirit in me shall behold, and
what it shall endure. Some internal fatality, their
own brute existence and wilfulness, must be responsible
for the fact that things are as they are, and not other
wise. If any instance of spirit was to arise anywhere,
the ground of it (if I speak of grounds at all) must
have been irrational. Spirit has the innocence of a
child ; it pleads not guilty ; at most it has become,
without knowing how, an accomplice after the fact.
It is astonished at everything. It is essentially,
wherever it may be found, unsubstantial and ex
pressive ; it is essentially secondary. Even if in fact
some instance of spirit, some isolated intuition, sprang
miraculously into being in an absolute void, and
nothing else had ever existed or would exist, yet
logically and in its own eyes that intuition would be
secondary, since no principle internal to spirit, but
only brute chance, would be expressed in the existence
of that intuition, and in the arbitrary choice of the
essence that happened to appear there. Spirit is
therefore of its very nature and by its own confession
the voice of something else : it speaks not of itself,
but of the Father that sent it. I am accordingly
prepared to find some arbitrary world or other in
existence; and since this arbitrary world obviously
has spirit in it, my problem is reduced to inquiring
what features, in this arbitrary existing world, can
have called spirit forth, and made it their living witness.
I postpone the detail of this inquiry, but I have
already indicated how the life of nature is expressed
in the chief phases of spirit. Wakefulness, common
to all these phases, is itself a witness to animal unrest,
appetition, alarm, concern, preparation. It would be

286 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

inane, as well as impossible, for me to open my eyes,
if in looking I did not identify my spirit with my
material person in its material predicaments, raising
to an actual hypostasis in consciousness its material
sensitiveness to outlying things. Electric influences
issuing from these allow my organs to adjust themselves
before grosser contact occurs ; and then intuition is a
premonition of material fusion. Organic systems
about to collide send forth this conscious cry or
salutation. The current established may prevent a
ruder shock, or may precipitate it, according to the
prepared instinct of the receivers. The intuition
expresses the initial fusion involved in the distant
response, as if a ghostly messenger of oncoming
things had rushed like a forerunner into the audience
chamber, announcing their arrival. It is only mes
sengers that reach the spirit, even in the thick of the
fray ; but by lending credence to their hot reports, it
can live through the battle, lost in its mists and passions,
and thinking itself to give and to receive the blows.

For a man, and especially for a philosopher, to
suggest that spirit does not exist may accordingly pass
for a delicious absurdity, and the best of unconscious
comedy. If it had been some angel that denied it,
because in his serenity and selflessness he could not
discover that he was alive, we might regard the denial
of spirit as the highest proof of spirituality : but in a
material creature struggling to see and to think, and
tossed from one illusion and passion to another, such
a denial seems not only stupid, but ungracious ; for
a man ought to be very proud of this dubious spark
in his embers, and nurse it more tenderly than the
life of a frail child. Nevertheless I think that those
who deny the existence of spirit, although their
language is rash and barbarous, are honestly facing
the facts, and are on the trail of a truth. Spirit is
too near them for them to stop at it in their eagerness

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT 287

to count their visible possessions ; and when they
hear the word used, it irritates them, because they
suppose it means some sort of magical power or
metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive,
and to impose purposes on nature ; purposes which
such a prior spirit, being supernatural and immortal,
could have had no reason for choosing. Such a
dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an im
material matter, a second physical substance dis
tinguished from its grosser partner only in that we
know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all
those results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief
in such a spirit is simply belief in magic ; innocent
enough at first when it is merely verbal and childish,
but becoming perverse when defended after it has
ceased to be spontaneous. I am not concerned with
spirit of that sort, nor with any kind of nether in
fluences. The investigation of substance and of the
laws of events is the province of physics, and I call
everything that science may discover in that direction
physical and not spiritual. Even if the substance of
things should be sentiency, or a bevy of souls, or a
single intense Absolute, it would be nothing but
matter to what I call spirit. It would exercise only
material functions in kindling the flame of actual
intuition, and bearing my light thoughts like bubbles
upon its infinite flood. I do not know what matter
is in itself : but what metaphysical idealists call spirit,
if it is understood to be responsible for what goes on
in the world and in myself, and to be the " reality "
of these appearances, is, in respect to my spiritual
existence, precisely what I call matter ; and I find
the description of this matter which the natural
sciences supply much more interesting than that given
by the idealists, much more beautiful, and much more
likely to be true. That there is no spirit in the
interstices of matter, where the magicians look for it,

288 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

nor at the heart of matter, where many metaphysicians
would place it, needs no proof to one who understands
what spirit is ; because spirit is in another realm of
being altogether, and needs the being and movement
of matter, by its large sweeping harmonies, to generate
it, and give it wings. It would be a pity to abandon
this consecrated word to those who are grubbing for
the atoms of substance, or speculating about a logic
in history, or tabulating the capers of ghosts ; especially
as there is the light of intuition, the principle of
actuality in vision and feeling, to call by that name.
The popular uses of the word spiritual support this
definition of it ; because intuition, when it thoroughly
dominates animal experience, transmutes it into pure
flame, and renders it religious or poetical, which is
what is commonly meant by spiritual.

COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE

DESCARTES was the first to begin a system of philosophy
with universal doubt, intended to be only provisional
and methodical ; but his mind was not plastic nor
mystical enough to be profoundly sceptical, even
histrionically. He could doubt any particular fact
easily, with the shrewdness of a man of science who
was also a man of the world ; but this doubt was only
a more penetrating use of intelligence, a sense that
the alleged fact might be explained away. Descartes
could not lend himself to the disintegration of reason,
and never doubted his principles of explanation. For
instance, in order to raise a doubt about the applica
bility of mathematics to existence (for their place in
the realm of essence would remain the same in any
case) he suggested that a malign demon might have
been the adequate cause of our inability to doubt that
science. He thus assumed the principle of sufficient
reason, a principle for which there is no reason at all.
If any idea or axiom were really a priori or spontaneous
in the human mind, it would be infinitely improbable
that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every
genius, in this respect, is his own malign demon.
Nor was this the worst ; for Descartes was not content
to assume that reason governs the world — a notion
scandalously contrary to fact, and at bottom contrary
to reason itself, which is but the grammar of human

289 U

290 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

discourse and aspiration linking mere essences. He
set accidental limits to his scepticism even about
facts. " I think, therefore I am," if taken as an
inference is sound because analytical, only repeating
in the conclusion, for the sake of emphasis, something
assumed in the premise. If taken as an attestation
of fact, as I suppose it was meant, it is honest and
richly indicative, all its terms being heavy with empirical
connotations. What is " thinking," what is " I,"
what is " therefore," and what is " existence " ? If
there were no existence there would certainly be no
persons and no thinking, and it may be doubted (as
I have indicated above) that anything exists at all.
That any being exists that may be called "I," so
that I am not a mere essence, is a thousand times
more doubtful, and is often denied by the keenest
wits. The persuasion that in saying " I am " I have
reached an indubitable fact, can only excite a smile
in the genuine sceptic. No fact is self-evident ; and
what sort of fact is this " I," and in what sense do I
" exist " ? Existence does not belong to a mere
datum, nor am I a datum to myself ; I am a somewhat
remote and extremely obscure object of belief. Doubt
less what I mean by myself is an existence and even
a substance ; but the rudimentary phantoms that
suggest that object, or that suggest the existence of
anything, need to be trusted and followed out by a
laborious empirical exploration, before I can make
out at all what they signify. Variation alleged, strain
endured, persistence assumed — notions which when
taken on faith lead to the assertion of existence and of
substance, if they remained merely notions would
prove nothing, disclose nothing, and assert nothing.
Yet such, I suppose, are the notions actually before
me when I say " I am." As to myself, when I proceed
to distinguish that object in the midst of the moving
world, I am roughly my body, or more accurately,

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 291

its living centre, master of its organs and seat of its
passions ; and this inner life of the body, I suspect,
was the rock of vulgar belief which Descartes found
at hand, easy to mount on, after his not very serious
shipwreck. And the rock was well chosen ; not
because the existence of my inner man is a simpler or
a surer fact than any other ; to a true sceptic this
alleged being so busily thinking and willing and
fuming within my body is but a strange feature in
the fantastic world that appears for the moment. Yet
the choice of the inner man as the one certain existence
was a happy one, because this sense of life within me
is more constant than other perceptions, and not
wholly to be shaken off except in profound contempla
tion or in some strange forms of madness. It was a
suitable first postulate for the romantic psychologist.
On this stepping-stone to idealism the father of
modern philosophy, like another Columbus, set his
foot with elegance. His new world, however, would
be but an unexplored islet in the world of the ancients
if all he discovered was himself thinking.

Thinking is another name for discourse ; and
perhaps Descartes, in noting his own existence, was
really less interested in the substance of himself, or
in the fact that he was alive, than in the play of terms
in discourse, which seemed to him obvious. Dis
course truly involves spirit, with its intuition and
intent, surveying those terms. And the definition of
the soul, that its essence is to think, being a definition
of spirit and not of a man's self, supports this inter
pretation. But discourse, no less than the existence
of a self, needs to be posited, and the readiness with
which a philosopher may do so yields only a candid
confession of personal credulity, not the proof of
anything. The assumption that spirit discoursing
exists, and is more evident than any other existence,
leads by a slightly?dirTerent path to the same conclusion

292 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

as the assumption of the self as the fundamental fact.
In the one case discourse will soon swallow up all
existence, and in the other this chosen existence,
myself, will evaporate into discourse : but it will
remain an insoluble problem whether I am a tran
scendental spirit, not a substance, holding the whole
imaginary universe in the frame of my thought, or
whether I am an instance of thinking, a phase of that
flux of sentience which will then be the substance of
the world. It is only if we interpret and develop
the Cartesian axiom in the former transcendental
sense that it supplies an instrument for criticism.
Understood in an empirical way, as the confident
indication of a particular fact, it is merely a chance
dogma, betraying the psychological bias of reflection
in modern man, and suggesting a fantastic theory of
the universe, conveniently called psychologism ; a
theory which fuses the two disparate substances
posited by Descartes, and maintains that while the
inner essence of substance everywhere is to think, or
at least to feel, its distribution, movement, and aspect,
seen from without, are those of matter.

In adopting the method of Descartes, I have sought
to carry it further, suspending all conventional cate
gories as well as all conventional beliefs ; so that not
only the material world but all facts and all existences
have lost their status, and become simply the themes
or topics which intrinsically they are. Neither myself
nor pure spirit is at all more real in that realm of
essence than any other mentionable thing. When it
comes to assertion (which is belief) I follow Descartes
in choosing discourse and (as an implication of dis
course) my substantial existence as the objects of
faith least open to reasonable doubt ; not because
they are the first objects asserted, nor because intrinsic
ally they lend themselves to existence better than
anything else, but simply because in taking note of

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 293

anything whatever I find that I am assuming the
validity of primary memory ; in other words, that
the method and the fact of observation are adventi
tious to the theme. But the fact that observation is
involved in observing anything does not imply that
observation is the only observed fact : yet in this gross
sophism and insincerity the rest of psychologism is
entangled.

Hume and Kant seemed sceptics in their day and
were certainly great enemies of common sense, not
through any perversity of temper (for both were men
of wise judgement) but through sophistical scruples
and criticism halting at unfortunate places. They
disintegrated belief on particular points of scholastic
philosophy, which was but common sense applied to
revelation ; and they made no attempt to build on
the foundations so laid bare, but rather to comfort
themselves with the assurance that what survived was
practically sufficient, and far simpler, sounder, and
purer than what they had demolished. After the
manner of the eighteenth century, they felt that
convention was a burden and an imposture, not
because here and there it misinterpreted nature, but
because it interpreted or defined nature at all ; and
in their criticism they ran for a fall. They had
nothing to offer in the place of what they criticised,
except the same cheque dishonoured. All their philo
sophy, where it was not simply a collapse into living
without philosophy, was retrenchment ; and they
retrenched in that hand-to-mouth fashion which
Protestantism had introduced and which liberalism
was to follow. They never touched bottom, and
nothing could be more gratuitous or more helpless
than their residual dogmas. These consisted in making
metaphysics out of literary psychology ; not seeing
that the discourse or experience to which they appealed
was a social convention, roughly dramatising those

294 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

very facts of the material world, and of animal life
in it, which their criticism had denied.

Hume seems to have assumed that every perception
perceived itself. He assumed further that these per
ceptions lay in time and formed certain sequences.
Why a given perception belonged to one sequence
rather than to another, and why all simultaneous
perceptions were not in the same mind, he never
considered ; the questions were unanswerable, so long
as he ignored or denied the existence of bodies. He
asserted also that these perceptions were repeated,
and that the repetitions were always fainter than the
originals — two groundless assertions, unless the transi
tive force of memory is admitted, and impressions
are distinguished from ideas externally, by calling an
intuition an impression when caused by a present
object, visible to a third person, and calling it an idea
when not so caused. Furthermore, he invoked an
alleged habit of perceptions always to follow one
another in the same order — something flatly contrary
to fact ; but the notion was made plausible by confusion
with the habits of the physical world, where similar
events recur when the conditions are similar. In
tuitions no doubt followr the same routine ; but the
conditions for an intuition are not the previous
intuitions, but the whole present state of the psyche
and of the environment, something of which the
previous intuitions were at best prophetic symptoms,
symptoms often falsified by the event.

All these haltings and incoherences arose in the
attempt to conceive experience divorced from its
physical ground and from its natural objects, as a
dream going on in vacuo. So artificial an abstraction,
however, is hard to maintain consistently, and Hume,
by a happy exercise of worldly wit, often described
the workings of the mind as our social imagination
leads us all vaguely to conceive them. In these

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 295

inspired moments he made those acute analyses of
our notions of material things, of the soul, and of cause,
which have given him his name as a sceptic. These
analyses are bits of plausible literary psychology,
essays on the origin of common sense. They are
not accounts of what the notions analysed mean, much
less scientific judgements of their truth. They are
supposed, however, by Hume and by the whole
modern school of idealists, to destroy both the meaning
of these notions and the existence of their intended
objects. Having explained how, perhaps, early man,
or a hypothetical infant, might have reached his first
glimmerings of knowledge that material things exist,
or souls, or causes, we are supposed to have proved
that no causes, no souls, and no material things can
exist at all. We are not allowed to ask how, in that
case, we have any evidence for the existence of early
man, or of the hypothetical infant, or of any general
characteristics of the human mind, and its tendencies
to feign. The world of literature is sacred to these
bookish minds ; only the world of nature and science
arouses their suspicion and their dislike. They think
that " experience," with the habits of thought and
language prevalent in all nations, from Adam down,
needs only to be imagined in order to be known truly.
All but this imagined experience seems to them the
work of imagination. While their method of criticism
ought evidently to establish not merely solipsism, but
a sort of solipsism of the present datum, yet they
never stop to doubt the whole comedy of human
intercourse, just as the most uncritical instinct and
the most fanciful history represent it to be. How can
such a mass of ill-attested and boldly dogmatic assump
tions fail to make the critics of science uncomfortable
in their own house ? Is it because the criticism of
dogma in physics, without this dogma in psychology,
could never so much as begin ? Is not their criticism

296 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

at bottom a work of edification or of malice, not of
philosophic sincerity, so that they reject the claim to
knowledge only in respect to certain physical, meta
physical, or religious objects which the modern mind
has become suspicious of, and hopes to feel freer
without ? Meantime, they keep their conventional
social assumptions without a qualm, because they
need them to justify their moral precepts and to lend
a false air of adequacy to their view of the world.
Thus we are invited to believe that our notions of
material things do not mean what they assert, but
being illusions in their deliverance, really signify only
the series of perceptions that have preceded them, or
that, for some unfathomable reason, may be expected
to ensue.

All this is sheer sophistry, and limping scepticism.
Certainly the vulgar notions of nature, and even the
scientific ones, are most questionable ; and they may
have grown up in the way these critics suggest ; in
any case they have grown up humanly. But they
are not mere images ; they are beliefs ; and the truth
of beliefs hangs on what they assert, not on their
origin. The question is whether such an object as
they describe lies in fact in the quarter where they
assert it to lie ; the genealogy of these assertions in
the mind of the believer, though interesting, is ir
relevant. It is for science and further investigation of
the object to pronounce on the truth of any belief. It
will remain a mere belief to the end, no matter how
much corroborated and corrected ; but the fact that
it is a belief, far from proving that it must be false,
renders it possibly true, as it could not be if it asserted
nothing and had no object beyond itself which it
pointed to and professed to describe. This whole
school criticises knowledge, not by extending knowledge
and testing it further, but by reviewing it maliciously,
on the tacit assumption that knowledge is impossible.

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 297

But in that case this review of knowledge and all this
shrewd psychology are themselves worthless ; and we
are reduced, as Hume was in his deeper moments of
insight, to a speechless wonder. So that whilst all
the animals trust their senses and live, philosophy
would persuade man alone not to trust them and, if
he was consistent, to stop living.

This tragic conclusion might not have daunted a
true philosopher, if like the Indians he had reached
it by a massive moral experience rather than by
incidental sophistries with no hold on the spirit. In
that case the impossibility of knowledge would have
seemed but one illustration of the vanity of life in
general. That all is vanity was a theme sometimes
developed by Christian preachers, and even in some
late books of the Bible, with special reservations ; but
it is an insight contrary to Hebraic religion, which
invokes supernatural or moral agencies only in the
hope of securing earthly life and prosperity for ever.
The wisdom demanded could, therefore, not be negative
or merely liberating ; and scepticism in Christian
climes has always seemed demoralising. When it
forced itself on the reluctant mind, people either
dismissed it as a game not worth playing and sank
back, like Hume, into common sense, though now
with a bad conscience ; or else they sought some
subterfuge or equivocation by which knowledge, ac
knowledged to be worthless, was nevertheless officially
countersigned and passed as legal tender, so that the
earnest practice of orthodoxy, religious or worldly,
or both at once, might go on without a qualm. Evi
dently, to secure this result, it was necessary to set up
some oracle, independent of natural knowledge, that
should represent some deeper reality than natural
knowledge could profess to reach ; and it was necessary
that this oracle itself, by a pious or a wilful oversight,
should escape criticism ; for otherwise all was lost.

298 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

It escaped criticism by virtue of the dramatic illusion
which always fills the sails of argument, and renders
the passing conviction the indignant voice of omni
science and justice. The principle invoked in criti
cism, whatever it might be, could not be criticised.
It did not need to be defended : its credentials were
the havoc it wrought among more explicit conventions.
And yet, by a mocking fatality, those discredited
conventions had to be maintained in practice, since
they are inevitable for mankind, and the basis, even
by their weaknesses, of the appeal to that higher
principle which, in theory, was to revise and reject
them. This higher principle was no alternative view
of the world, no revelation of further facts or destinies ;
it was the thinking or dreaming spirit that posited
those necessary conventions, and would itself die if
it ceased to posit them. In discrediting the fictions
of spirit we must, therefore, beware of suspending
them. We are not asked to abolish our conception
of the natural world, nor even, in our daily life, to
cease to believe in it ; we are to be idealists only
north-north-west, or transcendentally ; when the wind
is southerly, we are to remain realists. The pronounce
ments of animal faith have no doubt been reversed
in a higher court, but with this singular proviso, that
the police and the executioner, while reverently ac
knowledging the authority of the higher tribunal, must
unflinchingly carry out the original sentence passed
by the lower. This escape from scepticism by
ambiguity, and by introducing only cancelled dogmas,
was chosen by German philosophy at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and by modernism and
pragmatism at the end of it.

Kant was thought a sceptic in his day, and called
his philosophy criticism ; but his scepticism was very
impure and his criticism, though laborious, was very
uncritical. That he was regarded as a great philosopher

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 299

in the nineteenth century is due to the same causes that
made Locke seem a great philosopher in the eighteenth,
not to any intrinsic greatness. He announced some
revolutionary principles, which alarmed and excited
the public, but he did not carry them out, so that the
public was reassured. In his criticism of knowledge
he assumed without question the Humian sequences
of perceptions, although contrary to his doctrine of
time ; and, more wisely than Hume, he never abandoned
the general sense that these perceptions had organs
and objects beneath and beyond them ; but having
cut off, by his malicious criticism of knowledge, the
organs and objects which perceptions notoriously have,
he was forced to forge others, artificial and meta
physical. Instead of the body, he posited a tran
scendental ego, the categories of thought, and a
disembodied law of duty ; instead of natural substances
he posited the unknowable. I shall revert to these
subjects in discussing the realm of matter, which is
where they belong. Here I am concerned only with
the analysis of knowledge, which in Kant was most
conscientious, and valuable in spite of its rationalistic
bias and its mythical solutions.

Any intelligent mind comes upon data and takes
them for signs of things. Empirical criticism consists
in reverting from these objects of intent, the things of
common sense and science, to the immediate data by
which they are revealed. But since data are not
vacantly stared at by an intelligent being, but are
interpreted and combined, there is evidently a subtler
element in knowledge of things than the data which
empirical criticism reverts to : namely, the principles
of interpretation, since the data are read and taken to
be significant of existing objects, far richer and more
persistent and more powerful than themselves. These
principles I have summarily called animal faith, not
being concerned to propose any analysis of them

300 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

that should apply to all minds or to all objects ; for
I conceive, for instance, that the future, in other
animals, may be a more frequent and vivid object of
animal faith than the past or the material environment
posited by human beings. But Kant, assuming that
mind everywhere must have a single grammar, in
vestigated very ingeniously what he conceived to be
its recondite categories, and schemata, and forms of
intuition : all pompous titles for what Hume had
satirically called tendencies to feign. But Kant, in
dishonouring the intellect, at least studied it devotedly,
like an alienist discovering the logic of madness ; and
he gave it so elaborate an articulation, and imposed it
so rigorously on all men for ever, that people supposed
he was establishing the sciences on a solid foundation
rather than prescribing for all men a gratuitous uni
formity in error. Yet this was his true meaning :
and in spite of its psychological prefaces and meta
physical epilogues, and in spite of this pedantry about
the necessary forms of all the sciences, the heart of
the Kantian system was the most terrible negation.
Among transcendental principles he placed space,
time, and causality ; so that, if he had been consistent,
he would have had to regard all multiple and successive
existence as imagined only. Everything conceivable
would have collapsed into the act of conceiving it,
and this act itself would have lost its terms and its
purpose, and evaporated into nothing. But not at
all ; as if aware that all his conclusions were but
curiosities in speculation and academic humours, he
continued to think of experience as progressing in
time, trifled most earnestly with astronomy and
geography, and even comforted the pious with a
postulate of immortality, as if time existed otherwise
than in imagination. In fact, these backslidings were
his amiable side : he always retained a certain humanity
and wisdom, being much more thoroughly saturated

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 301

with his conventional presuppositions than with his
extravagant conclusions.

A philosopher, however, must be taken at his best,
or at his worst ; in any case, his pure doctrine must
be freed as far as possible from its personal alloy :
and the pure doctrine of Kant was that knowledge is
impossible. Anything I could perceive or think was
ipso facto a creature of my sense or thought. Nature,
history, God and the other world, even a man's
outspread experience, could be things imagined only.
Thought — for it was still assumed that there was
thought — was a bubble, self-inflated at every moment,
in an infinite void. All else was imaginary ; no world
could be anything but the iridescence of that empty
sphere. And this transcendental thought, so rich in
false perspectives, could it be said to exist anywhere,
or at any time, or for any reason ?

Here we touch one of those ambiguities and
mystifications in which German philosophy takes
refuge when pressed ; strong in the attack, it dissolves
if driven to the defensive. Transcendentalism, in so
far as it is critical, is a method only ; the principles by
which data are interpreted come into play whenever
intelligence is at work. The occasions for this exercise,
as a matter of fact, are found in animal life ; and while
every mind, at every moment, is the seat and measure
of its own understanding, and creates its own know
ledge (though, of course, not the objects on which
animal life is directed and which it professes to know)
yet the quality and degree of this intelligence may vary
indefinitely from age to age and from animal to animal.
Transcendental principles are accordingly only prin
ciples of local perspective, the grammar of fancy in
this or that natural being quickened to imagination,
and striving to understand what it endures and to
utter what it deeply wills. The study of transcendental
logic ought, therefore, to be one of the most humane,

302 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

tender, tentative of studies : nothing but sympathetic
poetry and insight into the hang and rhythm of various
thoughts. It should be the finer part of literary
psychology. But such is not the transcendentalism
of the absolute transcendentalists. For them the
grammar of thought is single and compulsory. It is
the method of the creative fiat by which not this or
that idea of the universe, but the universe itself,
comes into being. The universe has only a specious
existence ; and the method by which specious existence
is evoked in thought is divine and identical in all
thinking.

But why divine, and why always identical ? And
why any thinking at all, or any process or variation
in discourse, other than the given perspectives of the
present vision ? At this point vertigo seizes the
transcendentalist, and he no longer knows what he
means. On the one hand, phenomena cannot be
produced by an agency prior to them, for his first
principle is that all existence is phenomenal and exists
only in being posited or discovered. Will, Life, Duty,
or whatever he calls this transcendental agency, by
which the illusions of nature and history are summoned
from the vasty deep, cannot be a fact, since all facts
are created by its incantations. On the other hand
phenomena cannot be substantial on their own account,
for then they would not be phenomena but things,
and no transcendental magician, himself non-existent
and non-phenomenal, would be needed to produce
them.

Absolute transcendentalism — the only radical form
of a psychological criticism of knowledge — is ac
cordingly not a thinkable nor a stable doctrine. It is
merely a habit of speaking ambiguously, with a just
sense for the living movement of thought and a
romantic contempt for its deliverance. Self-conscious
ness cannot be, as this school strove to make it, a first

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 303

principle of criticism : it is far too complex and
derivative for that. But transcendentalism is a
legitimate attitude for a poet in his dramatic reflections
and romantic soliloquies ; it is the principle of per
spective in thought, the scenic art of the mental theatre.
The fully awakened soul, looking about it in this
strange world, may well believe that it is dreaming.
It may review its shifting memories, with a doubt
whether they were ever anything in themselves. It
may marshal all things in ideal perspectives about the
present moment, and esteem them important and
even real only in so far as they diversify the mental
landscape. And to compensate it for the visionary
character which the world takes on, it may cultivate
the sense (by no means illusory) of some deep fountain
of feeling and fancy within the self. Such wistful
transcendentalism is akin to principles which in India
long ago inspired very deep judgements upon life.
It may be practised at will by any reflective person
who is minded to treat the universe, for the time
being, as so much furniture for his dreams.

Yet this attitude, seeing that man is not a solitary
god but an animal in a material and social world,
must be continually abandoned. It must be abandoned
precisely when a man does or thinks anything im
portant. Its own profundity is dreamful, and, so to
speak, digestive : action, virtue, and wisdom sound
another note. It is therefore no worthy philosophy ;
and in fact the Germans, whose philosophy it is,
while so dutiful in their external discipline, are senti
mental and immoral in their spiritual economy. If a
learned and placid professor tells me he is creating
the universe by positing it in his own mind according
to eternal principles of logic and duty, I may smile
and admire such an inimitable mixture of enthusiasm
and pedantry, profundity and innocence. Yet there
is something sinister in this transcendentalism, ap-

304 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

parently so pure and blameless ; it really expresses
and sanctions the absoluteness of a barbarous soul,
stubborn in its illusions, vulgar in its passions, and
cruel in its zeal — cruel especially to itself, as barbarism
always is, because it feeds and dilates its will as if its
will were an absolute power, whereas it is nothing
but a mass of foolish impulses and boasts ending in
ignominy. Moreover, transcendentalism cannot even
supply a thorough criticism of knowledge, which
would demand that the ideas of self, of activity, and
of consciousness should be disintegrated and reduced
to the immediate. In the immediate, however, there
is no transcendental force nor transcendental machinery,
not even a set of perceptions nor an experience, but
only some random essence, staring and groundless.

I hope I have taken to heart what the schools of
Hume and Kant have to offer by way of disintegrating
criticism of knowledge, and that in positing afresh the
notions of substance, soul, nature, and discourse, I
have done so with my eyes open. These notions are
all subject to doubt ; but so, also, are the notions
proposed instead by psychological philosophers. None
of these have reached the limit of possible doubt ;
yet the dogmas they have retained, being romantic
prejudices, are incoherent and incapable of serving
as the basis for any reasonable system : and in a
moral sense they are the very opposite of philosophy.
When pressed, their negations end in solipsism and
their affirmations in rhapsody. Far from purging the
mind and strengthening it, that it might gain a clearer
and more stable vision of the world, these critics have
bewildered it with a multitude of methods and vistas,
the expression of the confusion reigning in their day
between natural science and religious faith, and
between psychology and scepticism.

My endeavour has been to restore these things to
their natural places, without forgetting the assump-

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 305

tions on which they rest. But the chief difference
between my criticism of knowledge and theirs lies in
the conception of knowledge itself. The Germans
call knowledge Wissenschaft, as if it were something
to be found in books, a catalogue of information, and
an encyclopaedia of the sciences. But the question is
whether all this Wissenschaft is knowledge or only
learning. My criticism is criticism of myself : I am
talking of what I believe in my active moments, as a
living animal, when I am really believing something :
for when I am reading books belief in me is at its
lowest ebb ; and I lend myself to the suasion of
eloquence with the same pleasure (when the book is
well written) whether it be the Arabian Nights or the
latest philosophy. My criticism is not essentially a
learned pursuit, though habit may sometimes make my
language scholastic ; it is not a choice between artificial
theories ; it is the discipline of my daily thoughts
and the account I actually give to myself from moment
to moment of my own being and of the world around
me. I should be ashamed to countenance opinions
which, when not arguing, I did not believe. It would
seem to me dishonest and cowardly to militate under
other colours than those under which I live. Merely
learned views are not philosophy ; and therefore no
modern writer is altogether a philosopher in my eyes,
except Spinoza ; and the critics of knowledge in
particular seem to me as feeble morally as they are
technically.

I should like, therefore, to turn to the ancients
and breathe again a clear atmosphere of frankness and
honour ; but in the present business they are not
very helpful. The Indians were poets and mystics ;
and while they could easily throw off the conventions
of vulgar reason, it was often only to surrender them
selves to other conventions, far more misleading to a
free spirit, such as the doctrine of transmigration of

x

3o6 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

souls ; and when, as in Buddhism, they almost
vanquished that illusion, together with every other,
their emasculated intellect had nothing to put in its
place. The Greeks on the contrary were rhetoricians ;
they seldom or never reverted to the immediate for
a foothold in thought, because the immediate lies
below the level of language and of political convention.
But they wrere disputatious, and in that sense no
opinion escaped their criticism. In this criticism they
simply pitted one plausible opinion against another,
supporting each in turn by all conceivable arguments,
based on no matter what prejudices or presumptions.
The result of this forensic method was naturally a
suspense of rational judgement, favourable now to
frivolity and now to superstition. The frivolity ap
peared in the Sophists who, seeing that nothing was
certain, impudently assumed as true whatever it was
socially convenient to advocate. Protagoras seems to
have reduced this bad habit to an honest system, when
he taught that each occasion is, for itself, the ultimate
judge of truth. This, taken psychologically, is evi
dently the case : a mind cannot judge on other
subjects nor on other evidences than are open to it
when judging. But the judging moment need not
judge truly ; and to maintain (as Protagoras does in
Plato's Dialogue and as some pragmatists have done
in our day) that all momentary opinions are equal in
truth, though not equal in value, is to fail in radical
scepticism : for it is to assume many moments, and
knowledge (utterly inexplicable on these principles)
of their several sequences and import ; and to assume
something even more wanton, a single standard of
value by which to judge them all. Such incoherence
is not surprising in sophists whose avowed purpose
in philosophising is to survive and succeed in this
world, or perhaps in the next. Worldly people will
readily admit that some ideas are better than others,

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 307

even if both sets are equally false. The interest in
truth for its own sake is not a worldly interest, but
the human soul is capable of it ; and there might be
spirits directed on the knowledge of truth as upon
their only ultimate good, as there might be spirits
addressed exclusively to music. Which arts and
sciences are worth pursuing, and how far, is a question
for the moralist, to be answered in each case in view
of the faculties and genius of the persons concerned,
and their opportunities. Socrates may humorously
eschew all science that is useless to cobblers ; he
thereby expresses his plebeian hard sense, and his
Hellenic joy in discourse and in moral apologues ;
but if he allows this pleasant prejudice to blind him
to the possibility of physical discoveries, or of cogent
mathematics, he becomes a simple sophist. The
moralist needs true knowledge of nature — even a little
astronomy — in order to practise the art of life in a
becoming spirit ; and an agnosticism which was not
merely personal, provisional, and humble would be
the worst of dogmas.

A sinking society, with its chaos of miscellaneous
opinions, touches the bottom of scepticism in this
sense, that it leaves no opinion unchallenged. But as
a complete suspense of judgement is physically im
possible in a living animal, every sceptic of the de
cadence has to accept some opinion or other. Which
opinions he accepts, will depend on his personal
character or his casual associations. His philosophy
therefore deserts him at the threshold of life, just
when it might cease to be a verbal accomplishment ;
in other words, he is at intervals a sophist, but at no
time a philosopher. Nevertheless, among the Greek
sceptics there were noble minds. They turned their
scepticism into an expression of personal dignity and
an argument for detachment. In such scepticism
every one who practises philosophy must imitate

X2

308 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

them ; for why should I pledge myself absolutely to
what in fact is not certain ? Physics and theology, to
which most philosophies are confined, are dubious in
their first principles : which is not to say that nothing
in them is credible. If we assert that one thing is
more probable than another, as did the sceptics of the
Academy, we have adopted a definite belief, we profess
to have some hold on the nature of things at large, a
law seems to us to rule events, and the lust of scepticism
in us is chastened. This belief in nature, with a little
experience and good sense to fill in the picture, is
almost enough by way of belief. Nor can a man
honestly believe less. An active mind never really
loses the conviction that it is scenting the way of the
world.

Living when human faith is again in a state of
dissolution, I have imitated the Greek sceptics in
calling doubtful everything that, in spite of common
sense, any one can possibly doubt. But since life
and even discussion forces me to break away from a
complete scepticism, I have determined not to do so
surreptitiously nor at random, ignominiously taking
cover now behind one prejudice and now behind
another. Instead, I have frankly taken nature by the
hand, accepting as a rule in my farthest speculations
the animal faith I live by from day to day. There
are many opinions which, though questionable, are
inevitable to a thought attentive to appearance, and
honestly expressive of action. These natural opinions
are not miscellaneous, such as those which the Sophists
embraced in disputation. They are superposed in a
biological order, the stratification of the life of reason.
In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital
constitutional necessity, to belief in discourse, in
experience, in substance, in truth, and in spirit. All
these objects may conceivably be illusory. Belief in
them, however, is not grounded on a prior probability,

OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE 309

but all judgements of probability are grounded on
them. They express a rational instinct or instinctive
reason, the waxing faith of an animal living in a world
which he can observe and sometimes remodel.

This natural faith opens to me various Realms of
Being, having very different kinds of reality in them
selves and a different status in respect to my knowledge
of them. I hope soon to invite the friendly reader
to accompany me in a further excursion through those
tempting fields.

INDEX

Analysis and synthesis, 117-119
Animation, not behaviour, 244-246 ;

an expression of mechanism, not

a substitute, 246, 247 ; conceived

dramatically, 248, 249
Anthropomorphism excusable, 147,

148
Appearance, two senses of the word,

39, 43
Apperception, timeless, 24, 25, 28-

30 ; its physical ground, 282
Arabian Nights, 67, 160, 305
Aristotle, his metaphysics, vii ;
identifies essence with intuition,
126-129 ; on God, 130, 131 ; on
substance, 190 ; on entelechies,
217

Arts, creative like the senses, 87, 102
Astronomy, good for moralists, 307

Behaviour, theme of scientific psy
chology, 243-246

Belief, not implied in intuition, 16 ;
enacted before it is asserted, 264

Berkeley, alluded to, 58 ; his direct
intuition, 68 ; his nominalism, 97

Brahma, 18, 19, 51

British and German philosophy
criticises perception, not memory,
13 ; only literature, 254

Buddhism, 306

Causation, 210

Change, feeling of it not a change,

25 ; known by faith only, 26 ;

may be illusion, 30 ; fallacious

disproofs of it, 31, 32
Common sense, roughly sound, v
Contingency of all existence, 134,

135

Contradiction an essence of dis
course, 121, 137

Criticism, empirical and transcen
dental, 3,4; arises by conflict of
dogmas, 8 ; depends on literary
psychology, 187 ; should appeal
to living beliefs, 305

Data, non- existentials, 45; uni-
versals, 54 ; their basis cerebral,
56

Dateless, defined, 270

Democritus, ix, 55

Demonstration, assumes discourse,
115-119

Descartes, 17 ; doubts facts only,
289 ; cogito ergo sum, 290-293

Dialectic, not true unless descrip
tive, 28 ; involves belief in
memory, 119, 120

Discourse, an event, 119 ; involved
in positing anything, 124 ; dis
tinguished late, 193

Dogma, how precipitated, 6

Empiricism admits substance, 199-
20 1

Entelechy, 130, 217

Error distinguishes discourse from
its objects, 123

Esse est percipi, 58

Essences adumbrated, 35, 38, 39, 48 ;
simile of the costumer's shop, 70-
72 ; introduced, 73, 74 ; defined
further, 75-78 ; necessary terms
in knowledge, 80-82 ; of any
complexity, 116, 262 ; infinitely
comminuted, 129 ; without in
herent values, 130 ; not limited to
Platonic ideas, 225

Eternal, defined, 271

Eternity, 112

Euclid, 86, 121 ; his space, 116, 117

Events involve substance, 230-232

3i2 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

Everlasting, defined, 271
Evidence, two meanings, 43, 44, 99
Existence, the sense of it, 24, 25, 187,
188 ; not a datum, 34-38 ; pre
sence to intuition neither sufficient
for it nor necessary, 45-47 ; its
physical definition, 48 ; odious to
logic, 48, 206 ; name for an object
of faith, 42 ; felt as pure Being
posited, 273

Expectation, irrational as hunger, 36
Experience, use of the word, 138 ;
naturally conditioned, transcen-
dentally primary, 23, 24 ; con
ceived as a life, 57 ; is discourse
interrupted by shocks, 143 ; belief
in it imposed by instinct, not by
experience itself, 144 ; its primi
tive texture, 188, 189 ; imagined
experience hypostatised, 255, 256 ;
reduced to blank feeling or ex
tended to dreams, 260
Explanation, 208

Fact, 228, 229 ; never a datum, 91 ;

denied if regarded as a concept, 60
Faith prior to intuition, 107
Fichte, 62, 63, 184, 185
Future, an assumption, 36 ; rash

notion of it, 235

God assimilated to nature, 237 ; to
truth, 268 ; to the spirit of a
cosmos, 130, 131

Hamlet, 27, 58, 95

Heraclitus, ix, 29

History, dependent for its validity
on physics, 13 ; interfused with
fiction, 1 60 ; partly literary psy
chology, 253

Hume, his sharp intuition, 67, 68 ;
criticism by retrenchment, 293 ;
residual assumptions, 294 ; analy
sis of conventions, 295 ; sophis
tical result, 296, 297

Ideas not beliefs unless action is
suggested, 16 ; Platonic ideas,
222-224

Identification an act of faith, 117, 119

Identity felt under diverse appear
ances, 153

Illusion, three ways out of it, 72

Immortal, defined, 271

Indian philosophy, viii, 51-55, 67,
3°5, 3°6

Instantaneous, defined, 270

Intelligence expresses animal ad
justments, 281

Intent, 100, 137, 166, 167

Interpretation obscures the datum,
67, 68

Introjection, 241

Intuition yields only appearance, 24 ;
denied by sceptics, 58 ; an ex
pression of animal wakefulness,
133 ; does not think, 150 ; may
exist behind observable facts, 258 ;
divined by sympathy, 221, 250 ;
most communicable when most
articulate, 251

Ionian physics, vii, viii

Kant, 4, 97 ; his incoherence, 298 ;
his analysis of knowledge, 299,
300 ; destructive results, 301

Karma, 54

Knowledge, impossible with nothing
to know, 60 ; is symbolical, 95,
96, 98, 101 ; has a removed object,
154 ; bridges the flux, 161 ; its
animal basis, 164, 172 ; may
recover essences given elsewhere,
168, 169 ; not intuition, 170, 171 ;
the object identified by bodily
attitude (illustration of the moon),
172-177 ; though symbolical pro
gressive, 177-179 ; may be ade
quate to discourse elsewhere, 207 ;
when pictorially adequate it is
still faith, 107

Life of reason, 109, no

Literary psychology, 174 ; possibly
true, 259 ; turned into meta
physics, 293, 294

Logic, partly creative, partly de
scriptive, vi ; not coercive over
fact, ibid., 2, 3 ; studies essence,
not truth, 262

Memory, presence of the absent,
141 ; is direct, 151 ; posits anima
tion, 242 ; in a natural setting,
150, 158 ; pictorial exactitude
possible but worthless, 152, 153 ;
stationed in the present, which
frames the past, 154, 155 ; may be
truer than experience, 156 ; should
be selective, 157 ; criticised only
by fancy, 160

Metaphysics confuses different realms
of being, vii, 203, 208, 209, 218

INDEX

Natural philosophy, vii ; present
ferment in it, ix ; progresses in
knowledge, 218 ; has a poetic side,

234

Nature, the total object of percep
tion, 197, 198 ; connotations of
the word, 234 ; uniformity of
nature an assumption, ibid. ;
tested and embodied in art, 236,

239
Nirvana, 51

Object, use and misuse of the word,

202, 203
Order of genesis, of discovery, 109 ;

of evidence, no

Pain, 65, 66, 280

Parmenides, 29, 55, 6 1

Past, an object of faith, 29 ; may be

illusory, 36, 37
Perception, not intuition but faith

expressing a bodily response, 282,

283
Permanence given in experience,

193, 195
Phenomena, in Platonism, 224 ; in

modern philosophy, 225, 226
Plato, 69, 78, 85, 225, 226, 306
Platonic ideas, selected essences, 77 ;

hypostatised, 222-224
Positing, propriety of the term, 184
Primary and secondary qualities,

82-90

Protagoras, 306

Psyche, 19, 147, 156. Cf. Self
Psychologism, 256, 292
Psychology, scientific and literary,

252 ; supports the non-existence

of data, 63-66
Pythagoras, ix

Reality, meaning of the term, 33, 34 ;

eulogistic use of it, 51, 210
Reason, not a force, 186 ; principle

of sufficient reason, 289
Religious dogmas easily doubted, 1 1 ,

Scepticism, a conflict of dogmas, 8 ;
an accident in philosophy, 9 ;
rich in ideas, 67 ; a trance state,
69 ; would be the best philosophy
if tenable, too, 186 ; deprecated
in Christian times, 297

Sceptics in Greece, some sophists,
307 ; some true philosophers, 308

Schopenhauer, 68

Self, evidence for its existence,
146 ; may be denied, 148, 290 ;
is obscure, 149 ; an almost per
petual object, 291

Sensations and ideas, ambiguous
uses of the terms, 86-90, 188, 225

Shock, distinguishes experience from
pure discourse, 139, 141 ;
prompts to belief in the self and
in the object, 142

Socrates, his favourite essences, 78 ;
his utilitarianism in science, 307

Solipsism, untenable if personal, 13 ;
tenable if of the present moment,
15, 16

Sophists, 306

Soul, genesis of the notion, 216 ;
analysis of it, 218-221

Spinoza, right on chief issue, viii ;
thinks ideas beliefs, 16 ; defines
the realm of essence, 129 ; a
philosopher in the better sense,
3.05

Spirit, non-existential for transcen-
dentalists, 62 ; at home in intui
tion, 125, 126 ; implied in it, 147 ;
ready to be omniscient, 116 ;
timeless and supernatural in
status, 161, 162 ; distrusts sub
stance but lives by it, 147 ; is no
datum, 272 ; often more than
intuition, 273, 274 ; expresses
animal life, 276-280 ; is not a
substance, 286-288

Spiritual substance, a contradiction,
217 ; how suggested, ibid.

Substance, posited by intent express
ing animal reaction, 106 ; belief
in it primordial, 185, 187 ; prior
to intuition, 188 ; revealed on its
dynamic side, not pictorially, 197 ;
not metaphysical, 201, 202 ; the
material in things, 203 ; not
duplicated by them, 204 ; ex
plains their genesis and distribu
tion, 209 ; connects appearances,

212

Surprise, not occasioned by contin
gency, 136 ; incompatible with
omniscience, 276

Timeless, defined, 270

Transcendentalism, properly a
method only, 23 ; its subject and
object false, ibid. ; denies all
existences, 59-63 ; its ambiguity,

314 SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

297, 298 ; a part of literary psy
chology, 301 ; its metaphysical
form, 302 ; must be abandoned in
practice, 303 ; its latent bar
barism, 304

Truth, may be conveyed through
symbols, 179-181 ; mistaken for
substance, 226-228 ; possible in
literary psychology, 259 ; not
proper to names or values, 263 ;
ignored by supposing things to
change with the views of them,
264-266 ; not an existence, not an
opinion, not certitude, but the
ultimate description of things in

all their relations, 267, 268 ; the
subjective seat of opinions does
not jeopardise it, 306 ; may be
loved for its own sake, 307

Unity of apperception, 25
Universals, data of intuition, 91, 93
Universe, not known as a whole, vi ;
may be a chaos, 235, 237

Vagueness, relative, 94, 95
Variation involves eternal essences,

113, "4
Vedanta, 61

THE END

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Scepticism and animal faith. .S23